
Class _ 
Book_ 



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% %mlc i^motp of Colonial %iU 

Life in the 

rLlGHTEENTH C^ENTURY 

By 
GEORGE GARY EGGLESTON 

Author of 

"OUR FIRST CENTURY" 

"A CAPTAIN IN THE RANKS" 

"RUNNING THE RIVER," ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 




NEW YORK 

%. ^. 25aniCj^ 8s, Comjjanp 

1905 






{^wcr Qopiex rttNMive&t 

OCT 28 ll9Ui> 
Sooyrixni cjiM« 

COPY S. 



i; 



Copyright igo^ 

By a. S. BARNES & COMPANY 

All Kights Reserved 

Published October igoj 



INTRODUCTION 

THE social and political institutions of every 
country are the outgrowths of that country's 
life conditions, except in so far as institutions 
may be imposed upon a people by an authority 
outside of themselves. 

In our country outside authority has never been 
able thus to impress itself upon the minds and lives 
of the people. The development of American in- 
stitutions, American ideas, and American life, has 
been exclusively from within. Our system, from 
top to bottom, is the creation of the people who 
live under it. It is therefore peculiarly well 
adapted to their needs, and peculiarly an expression 
of their common thought and aspiration. 
[ The men and women who founded the English 
colonies in America, and the men and women who 
built those colonies up into great, self-governing 
commonwealths, were from the beginning men and 
women in revolt against the life conditions into 
which they were born. They were inspired by a 



vi INTRODUCTION 

determined purpose to better those life conditions, 
to organize society and the state in accordance with 
their own needs and in answer to their own aspira- 
tions of liberty and self government. ) 

In this volume and in the one preceding it, " Our 
First Century," an effort has been made to show 
how the colonists and the earlier native Americans 
did this work of social and political construction. 
It is a story which every American must know 
thoroughly if he would understand the institutions, 
the ideas, and the natural impulses of the Great 
Republic as they now are. 

Surely there could be no more enlightening story 
than that of our country's beginnings and early de- 
velopment ; for out of those beginnings and through 
that development there has come into being the 
greatest, richest, freest and most potent nation that 
has at any time existed on the face of the earth. It 
is at the same time the happiest, best fed, and most 
prosperous of nations. It is the only civilized land 
in which every man has an equal share with every 
other man in the government, the only land in 
which the conditions of life are such that the poor- 
est laborer may have meat on his table every day in 
the year, while his children, with education free, and 
with no barriers of caste to fix their status or to say 



INTRODUCTION vii 

nay to their ambitions, may freely and hopefully 
aspire to the very highest achievement. 

It has been the author's endeavor to tell the 
story of all this briefly, and with only so much of 
detail as is necessary to a just understanding of 
events, while showing forth what manner of men 
and women the builders of the nation were, what 
conditions surrounded them, how they lived, what 
clothes they wore, what sort of habitations they 
built, how they cooked and ate, what schools they 
had, and everything else that constituted their en- 
vironment, including their ignorance of sanitation, 
their lack of pavements, sewers and water supply in 
towns, the imperfection of their means of intercom- 
munication, their consequent isolation and the like. 
Attention has been given to their sports, their pun- 
ishments, their methods of farming and fighting, 
their commerce, their manufactures, their fisheries. 
Their deprivation of many things that in our time are 
accounted common necessaries of Hfe, is contrasted 
with their indulgence in luxuries of dress and living 
which we should now regard as foolish extravagance 
and ostentation. 

In the preceding volume — " Our First Century" 
— the period of Colony planting is dealt with. In 
the present volume the steady and resistless advance 



viii INTRODUCTION 

of the colonies toward National Independence is 
traced, as the most vital fact of American life during 
the first three quarters of the eighteenth century, 
and one which dominated and colored all other con- 
ditions of the life of that time. 

In this volume, as in the previous one, the author 
and publishers have availed themselves of the aid 
of many illustrations which show forth the condi- 
tions of life in aid of the written text. 



CONTENTS 

chapter. page 

Introduction ..... v 

i. when the eighteenth century dawned i 

ii. first half of the century . . 22 

iii. the georgia colony . ' . , -32 

iv. life in georgia and the carolinas . 39 

v. further wars of the colonies . • $2 

vl the first independent colonial war 6 1 

vil the problem of the colonies brad- 

DOCK's BLUNDER .... 73 

VIIL COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY , . .84 

IX. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH POWER 

IN AMERICA ..... 92 

X. SOME COLONIAL GRIEVANCES . . . lO/ 

XL THE ATTEMPT TO ENFORCE OBNOXIOUS 

LAWS ; JAMES OTIS'S INSPIRING MAXIM II 3 
XII. THE BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT . . 1 25 

XIIL COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY ">- .134 
XIV. THE EVENT OF PATRICK HENRY . . 1 45 

XV. THE ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS . 1 56 

XVI. DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION . . I /I 

ix 



X CONTENTS 

CHAPTER. PAGE 

XVII. BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS . . I83 

XVHI. THE APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION . 1 94 

XIX. HEALTH CONDITIONS AND PECULIARITIES 

OF LIFE IN THE COLONIES , . . 209 

XX, THE PROSPERITY OF THE COLONIES . 2l8 

XXI. EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES — PECULIAR 

CUSTOMS . ... . . 224 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 
Colonial Mansion, residence of the late "William Bull Pringle, 

Charleston, S. C Frontispiece 

New York in 1697 (City Hall and Great Dock) .... 2 

New York City Hall, Wall Street. Corner stone laid in 1699 . 4 

An Old Maryland manor house ....... 7 

Sawing boards 9 

Hand mill ... 12 

Map of the " Do Peyster Garden " in Wall Street, New York 1718 13 
Old Iron Furnace near Warwick, N. Y. . . . . .16 

Spinning flax .......... 18 

Spinning wool .......... 20 

Map illustrating the French and Indian "Wars .... 23 

Queen Anne ........... 25 

Acadia, Port Royal and Louisbourg and the route by sea between 

Boston and Quebec 26 

' Old Swedish Church, Wilmington, Del. ..... 27 

An early printing press ........ 29 

General James Oglethorpe ........ 33 

Georgia and Florida as they were in Oglethorpe's time . . 35 
A plantation gateway, entrance to the estate of William Byrd at 

Westover, Va. . . . . . . . . . .41 

Carved doorway. Bull Pringle mansion, Charleston, S. C. . . 43 

Indian moccasins .......... 48 

Gateway at St. Augustine, Fla 53 

A French regular 55 

Old house at Deerfield 56 

A French officer 58 

A Canadian soldier .... , .... 62 

Blockhouse . 63 

George Washington 65 

xi 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A flintlock 68 

Fort Duquesne .......... 69 

Indian fur trader .......'.. 74 

Line of Braddock's march ........ 77 

The situation of Crown Point 81 

The Postal service in 1700 85 

Travelling on horseback . . . . • . . .86 

In a Virginia home ......... 89 

General Montcalm ......... 93 

Lord Loudoun ........ . . 94 

William Pitt 95 

Uniform of 43rd Regiment of Foot, raised in America (1704) . 96 
A Virginia mansion, Westover ...... 100 

Negro quarters .......... loi 

Lord Howe 102 

Ruins of Fort Ticonderoga . . . . . . . .103 

General Amherst . . . . . . . . .104 

General Wolfe 105 

Old view of Quebec 106 

Old Dutch house ... ..... . < 108 

Notice of runaway slave, " Charleston Gazette," 1754 . . 109 

Illustrated advertisement from the "Charleston Gazette," 1744 . no 
New York Colonial currency . . . . . . .114 

James Otis . .116 

Massachusetts three-penny bill . . . . . . .118 

North Carolina paper money . ...... 121 

A Virginia shilling . . . . . . . . .126 

Virginia shilling (reverse) , . . . . . .127 

Rosa Americana penny . . . . . . . .129 

Rosa Americana penny (reverse) ...... 130 

Nelson mansion . . . . . . . . . • ^35 

Interior of Rosewell manor . . . . . . .137 

Water mill 139 

Costume of Thomas Hancock. Black velvet coat, waistcoat and 
breeches (about 1755) ........ 140 

Costume of Thomas Boylston. White satin waistcoat, gold trim- 
ming (about 1720) ......... 141 

From portrait or Mrs. Simon Stoddard (about 1725) . . 142 



ILLUSTRATIONS xiii 

PAGE 

Quaker bonnet . . .143 

Colonial tea set of gold, belonging to the Draytons of Drayton 
Hall, S. C. .......... 144 

Rolling tobacco on the wharves . . . . . .147 

Patrick Henry . 148 

Advertisement from the " New York Weekly Gazette and Post- 
Boy" (1765) 149 

Costume of Peter Faneuil. Velvet coat, cloth waistcoat, velvet 
ruffles (about 1740) . . . . . . . -151 

Windsor chair. Facsimile of a cut in the "New York Weekly Ga- 
zette and Post-Boy" 1765 . . . . . . .152 

From portrait of Mrs. Anna Gee (about 1745) .... 153 

Samuel Adams . . . . . . . . . .154 

An old New York mansion. Van Rensselaer manor house at Green- 
bush, N. Y. 158 

Colonial fragments : Door trim from 55 Broadway, N. Y. ; George 
Washington's chair; clock at 57 Broadway .... 164 

A spinning bee . 172 

A Colonial tea party ........ .174 

A hatter's shop in old times . . . . . . .176 

A Conestoga wagon in the Bull's Head Yard, Philadelphia . 184 

A pack horse 185 

A wooden tray .......... 186 

Skillets 187 

Daniel Boone . . . . . . . . . .189 

Old windmill .......... 190 

A needlework sampler . .191 

From portrait of Mrs. Mary Simibert (about 1735) . . . 192 

Philipse Manor, Yonkers, N. Y. ; as it formerly appeared. . 195 

The Peabody mansion, Danvers, Mass. Built about 1745 by 

"King" Hooper of Marblehead . . . , . .197 

From portrait of Mrs. Thomas Boylston (about 1765) . . 198 

Black silk bonnet . • . . . . . . .199 

Musk-melon bonnet 200 

Pewter chafing dish ......... 202 

The Royal Exchange for merchants. Built in 1752 on Broad 

Street, N. Y., nearly on the line of Water Street . . . 204 
Costume from an old portrait 206 



xiv ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 
A Colonial kitchen 214 

Kitchen fireplace . . . . . . . . -215 

Old whale ships .......... 222 

King's College (now Columbia), Barclay Street and College Place, 

N. Y. ; corner stone laid in 1756 .... . . 225 

A form of stocks ......... 226 

Ducking stool 227 

A scold, gagged 228 

In a New England meetinghouse ..... . 235 

Present territory of the United States, showing by whom it was 

claimed before 1763 ........ 239 

The Beekman coach . . . . . . . .241 

The author and publishers wish to achnowledge the courtesy of the Cen- 
tury Company and the Amei-ican Book Companij in granting permission 
to use several illustrations which appear in this book. 



LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
CENTURY 



CHAPTER I 

WHEN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DAWNED 

AT the beginning of the eighteenth century the 
colonists, north and south, had learned in a 
considerable degree how to live in America. 
They had learned in each colony something of what 
crops the soil and the climate favored. They had 
learned in each of the colonies how to care for their 
domestic animals and fowls. In brief, they had 
learned fairly well how to live in their new homes, 
and how to produce there all that they needed for 
sustenance, together with a considerable surplus for 
export. 

They were no longer dependent upon the mother 
country for food, and if they were still dependent 
upon it for manufactured articles, at any rate their 
surplus food products, ship stores, fish, and the like, 

A 1 



2 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



were amply sufficient to buy all that they needed of 
manufactures. 

The colonists were to a great degree dependent 
upon the mother country — which they were by 
that time strongly disposed to regard as a step- 
mother country — for all sorts of supplies that were 




New York in 1697. (City Hall and Great Dock.) 

the products of factories. Yet many of the colo- 
nists, both north and south, were rich enough to 
have all these things in plenty in their houses — 
brasses, rugs, mahogany furniture, leather, carpets, 
mirrors, chests of drawers, rich tapestries, porcelain, 
pewter utensils, tables of rosewood, tablecloths — 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 3 

which they called carpets — and napkins of fine linen, 
clocks of artistic manufacture, combs of ivory, 
brushes of great value, and a multitude of other 
articles of luxurious use. In the " plantation book" 
of one old Virginia family I once found this entry 
under date of 1701 : " Bought sixteen towels tor the 
bath, rough in texture, but excellent in absorbing 
capacity, for four shillings apiece." The shilling in 
Virginia was i6f cents, but it represented a value 
greater than twenty-five cents does in our time, so 
that these sixteen ordinary bath towels cost my lady 
the equivalent of sixteen dollars or more of our 
money. 

In another plantation book there is this entry 
under date of 1720: "Sarah Jane return"^ from 
Madera by way of Eng'\ Wheat sold at good 
advtg. Brought me six casks Madera, one port 
and two Bordeau. Allso 2 pretty China tea setts 
and traits [trays], cost 12 pounds y 6*^." 

It was the custom even that early for a number 
of planters to club together, freight a little ship with 
wheat, send it to Madeira, and thence to England 
and home again with wines and other luxuries for 
home use. The " Sarah Jane," was doubtless a 
New England ship chartered for an expedition of 
this kind. 



4 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

All these things meant luxury, and the-better-to- 
do colonists certainly lived in luxury when the seven- 
teenth century ended and the eighteenth century 
began. 

The conditions in New England were not widely 
different from those at the south, except as the cir- 




New York City Hall, Wall Street. Corner stone laid in 1699. 

cumstances, the climate and the temperament of the 
people made them so. A good many well-to-do 
men, and some wealthy men, had come into the 
New England, colonies, and they built fine houses 
and fared sumptuously. So, too, in Maryland, and 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 5 

still more in the Carolinas, there had been a con- 
siderable immigration of wealthy gentry, who had 
established fine plantation " seats," there where they 
intended that their children after them should live 
in state. The Quakers of Pennsylvania made less 
display, but they were thrifty folk who prospered 
mightily in the new land, and they were minded to 
enjoy the fruits of their labor in their own fashion. 
Their clothing was of Quaker cut, but the cloths 
and silks of which it was made were of the best. 
Their houses were plain in structure but the life 
within them suffered no lack of any luxury that 
abundant money could buy. 

In order to understand the state of mind of the 
colonists at the beginning of this new century it is 
necessary to bear always in mind the fact that from 
the beginning, or almost from the beginning, all the 
acts of these people had been dominated by a spirit 
of discontent with things as they were, and by a 
fixed purpose to make them better. All these peo- 
ple — whether Puritans in New England or Cava- 
liers in Virginia, or Quakers in Pennsylvania, or 
Catholics in Maryland, or Huguenots in the Caro- 
linas, or Germans in Pennsylvania — had crossed the 
ocean in protest against conditions in their home 
lands. They had all come to this country in search 



6 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of liberty to live their own lives in their own way. 
The fundamental idea in the minds of all of them 
was the idea of the right of men and communities to 
govern themselves free from interference from with- 
out. If they were themselves sometimes intolerant, 
their intolerance was mainly self-defensive, and those 
who found conditions unsatisfactory in one colony, 
were free to remove to another. A vast, unoccupied 
continent lay before them where to choose. Thus 
when conditions in Massachusetts became unbear- 
able to such liberty-loving spirits as Roger Williams 
and Anne Hutchinson and their followers, those 
persecuted ones removed to Rhode Island. And 
when later a lesser discontent sprang up in Massa- 
chusetts, a large body of the people living there 
migrated to Connecticut, in search of a larger liberty. 
In the same way, when the Germans in New York 
felt themselves hardly used, they removed to Penn- 
sylvania. So, too, though later, the Scotch-Irish and 
others, in the Carolinas, crossed the mountains and 
made new settlements in the wilderness at cost of 
great hardship to themselves, and, having done so, 
threw off the yoke of the colonies from which they 
had come and set up little states of their own. 

Everywhere the dominating thought found ex- 
pression in revolt against all authority from without, 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 




8 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

and the assertion of the principle of local self- 
government. 

Even within each of the colonies, this thought 
was crystallized into institutions such as the New 
England Town Meeting and the Virginia County 
Court — each a little sovereignty in itself, claiming 
and exercising the right of home rule. 

Tt is not too much to say that every one of the 
colonies had been planted in the spirit of revolt 
against conditions or institutions that had bred dis- 
content, and that the history of their growth and ex- 
tension had been a story of successive revolts and 
removals in obedience to the all-dominating doctrine 
that every community has a right to manage its 
own affairs in its own way. That thought continued 
to control the history of the colonies during the 
period from the dawn of the century to the outbreak 
of the Revolution. The history of the eighteenth 
century is a story of revolt in the name of liberty 
and independence. 

The seventeenth century had been a period of 
colony planting in America. That work of planting 
had been successfully done by brave and resolute 
men. By the time that the sixteen hundreds ended, 
and the seventeen hundreds began, the foundations of 
a great nation had been securely laid on these shores. 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 9 

From Maine to South Carolina there were firmly 
fixed and thoroughly organized English colonies. 
These were no longer experimental settlements. 
They were colonies in which life had taken perma- 
nent fi^rm. Colonies in which institutions — politi- 
cal, social, religious and industrial — had taken root 
in the soil and become fixed for good or ill. 

The men and women who inhabited America 
when the year 1701 intro- 
duced a new century, had 
come hither to stay. ^ 
Many of them had been 
born here and knew no 
other country except by 
tradition. They had built 
up homes for themselves. Sawing boards. 

They had organized their political institutions with 
reference to their own political needs. They had ar- 
ranged their religious affairs in each colony in 
accordance with their several beliefs, but mainly 
with a larger tolerance for differences than had been 
permitted at first. They had organized society 
upon somewhat new lines, more democratic than 
those that prevailed in England, but still with 
marked distinctions between classes. 

In Virginia the first colonists had been succeeded 




10 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

by a large immigration of well-to-do, middle-class 
Englishmen, including a few persons of noble blood. 
In that colony the dominating impulse had been to 
set up plantations which should become great " es- 
tates " in the English sense of the term. This 
impulse really determined the history of Virginia for 
generations afterwards, the great planters constituting 
a dominant and controlHng class, just as the clergy- 
men were in New England and the patroons in 
New York. 

At first the houses of the colonists had been 
hovels, or holes dug in the ground, or bush shelters, 
or bark huts. When New York consisted of thirty 
houses, twenty-nine of them were bark hovels. 
A little later the colonists built log cabins with 
earthen floors. A little later still the houses had 
been log cabins with " puncheon " or hewed timber 
floors, windows made of greased cambric, or greased 
paper, and chimneys built of sticks and daubed with 
mud. But as the quality of the immigrants im- 
proved, and as the wealth of the colonists increased, 
the houses became steadily better and better. 

After the policy of the private ow^nership of land 
was adopted in the colony, the young English gen- 
tlemen who settled in Virginia had an easy road 
open to them. They had only to secure a grant 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 11 

of Virginia lands, a thing not difficult to do. Then, 
upon their arrival in the colony, they had only to 
select the land they desired and make it their own. 
Next they bought white servants or negro slaves to 
till the land they had secured by patent or grant. 

In the main they employed white servants, at 
least during the first three quarters of the seventeenth 
century. During that time, as we have seen in 
" Our First Century," there had been a very small 
importation of negro slaves into the colony. As 
late as 1671 there were only about two thousand 
negroes there, while the white servants in the same 
year numbered no less than six thousand. 

As soon as well-to-do Englishmen beo-an to come 
to the colony there was a very great improvement 
in the quality and character of the dwellings erected. 
Brick quickly came into use. At first bricks were 
used mainly in the construction of chimneys. These 
were often built in the middle of the house, with fire- 
places in the corners of four rooms on each floor of 
the house, so that one chimney served eight rooms. 

But these chimneys were built upon cellar foun- 
dations that employed brick enough to build two or 
three houses under modern methods of construction. 

There were a good many houses built entirely of 
brick both in Virginia and South Carolina. These 



12 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



houses were usually very plain, box-like structures, 
with piazzas all around them, but they were in that 
time esteemed almost as palaces, while their owners, 
as dwellers in brick houses, were held to be some- 
thing akin to nabobs. 



\ 







Hand mill. 

A curious misapprehension has arisen out of this 
brick building. There were two kinds of bricks used 
— English bricks and Holland bricks. For a long 
time it was supposed by the descendants of these 
builders that English bricks had been imported from 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 13 




«<( hzi 






Presbj-toriiin 
Church 

Lot 



S * 74 ft. 

S M A. Je Peyste 



'S f SauiUL-1 B.lj-ard 
^ ^ 74 ft. 



2S 
— 5:.-. 



A T). P 
25 ft. Kips St. 



9r. n 


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a 

2r. ft. 


> 
2.'i"'ft. 




4Rft. 


j^p A. de Peyster 
•* S T.-i ft. 


ll 


.0 ^ 

;;; P Abruhiim do Peyster 

" »^ 122 ft. 


fj 


10 ^ 

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1^ tl 122 ft. 


K y 


Z ? Samuel Bayard 

" " 122 ft. 




^ f' Abraham de Peyster 




':!l f Abraliam de Peyster 

•" 5 122 ft. 




^ Samuel Bajard 

•" " 122 ft. 




Z, 0' Samuel Bayard 

■" » 122 ft. 




^ 0* Abraham do Peyster 

^ ■- 122 ft. 




^ I* Abraham de Peyster 

^ =■• 122 ft. 




2 Samuel Bayard 

f* ■"• 129 ft. 




f^ Abraiii de Peyoter 

^^-Slift. 


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i 

23.8 in 


23.8 in. 




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^ " 75 ft. 




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^ 76 I't. 



TAiJ Ao? sold it* Thumpaun 

Smith St. ianjnnksfjicr) in mi,M£iSQ 



14 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

England, and Holland bricks from Holland. Even 
Washington Irving, with all the minuteness of his 
learning, has fallen into that error. But in fact all, 
or very nearly all, these bricks, whether English or 
Dutch, were made in America, as later scholarly 
research has conclusively proved. The only differ- 
[ence between English bricks and Dutch bricks was 
one of dimensions. The small bricks, molded upon 
a Dutch model, were known as Holland bricks. The 
much larger ones, molded upon an English model, 
were called English bricks. The very learned and 
scholarly historian of South Carolina, Mr. McCrady, 
has conclusively proved that the so-called Eng- 
lish bricks used in the construction of Carolina 
houses could not have been imported from England. 
By simple arithmetical calculation he has shown that 
all the ships landing in the Carolinas during the 
seventeenth century — even if all of them had been 
loaded exclusively with bricks — could not have 
brought in enough bricks to build one half or one 
fourth the "English brick" houses of that part of 
the country. 

And there was no need. In all the colonies there 
was clay fit for brickmaking and in all of them 
there were skilled brickmakers. In New York the 
brickmakers, being Dutchmen, naturally adopted 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 15 

the model and dimensions of the Holland brick 
mold, and made Holland bricks along the Hud- 
son. In Virginia and the Carolinas, as the brick- 
makers were Englishmen, they very naturally made 
use of English dimensions in the manufacture of 
their bricks. So extensive was this industry indeed 
that the Virginians began exporting bricks early in 
the seventeenth century. 

But, in the main, colonial houses were built of 
wood. In all the colonies there was timber of the 
best sort and in limitless abundance. There were 
sawmills in America before there were any in Eng- 
land, and, even before the introduction of sawmills, 
the colonists found it cheaper and better to build 
of wood than to construct brick walls. 

They built substantially, however. They laid 
sills of heart pine twelve or fourteen inches square, 
upon brick or stone foundations. Into these they 
mortised — not the " two by fours " of flimsy modern 
construction — but solid, heart pine or white ash or 
oaken uprights eight inches square, and to these at 
the top they mortised great " wall plates," a foot or 
more in diameter, upon which they imposed a roof 
with rafters seven or eight inches thick, both ways. 

Many of those early colonial houses endure even 
unto this day, both in the south and in the north, 



16 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

bearing eloquent witness to the honesty and the con- 
scientiousness of early colonial building. 

The laws made in England were mainly antago- 
nistic to colonial manufactures. It was intended that 
the colonies should be " feeders " of English pros- 




Old iron furnace near Warwick, N. Y. 

perity. It was hoped that they would send to Eng- 
land large supplies of raw materials, and largely buy 
the products of English manufacture, thus paying 
a double tribute to English interests. 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 17 

It was hoped, soon after the beginning of the 
eighteenth century, that a considerable supply of 
crude iron might be smelted in the colonies and 
sent to England for manufacture there into articles 
of use. Coal had not yet come into general use as 
a fuel supply anywhere in the world, and the wood- 
lands of England were to a great extent exhausted. 
So it was thought that iron might be more cheaply 
smelted in the colonies, where there were limitless 
forests to furnish fuel, than in England. But the 
English manufacturers very jealously wanted the 
profit of converting the colony-smelted iron into 
utensils of every kind which could be sold back to 
the colonies. Accordingly, in 171 9, and later, the 
same English laws which encouraged the smelting 
of iron in the colonies, peremptorily forbade the 
colonial manufacture of such iron into instruments 
of use. The plan was to have the crude iron made 
on the American side of the ocean, shipped to Eng- 
land and there manufactured into articles of use 
which might be sent back to the colonies and there 
sold for a rich profit. 

In the same way, and in a like spirit, the English 
laws during the early part of the eighteenth century 
encouraged the manufacture of glass in Virginia, 
where fuel was cheap and plentiful, but forbade the 

B 



18 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

coloniiil manufacture of beads and trinkets of such 
glass. Beads and trinkets were used as currency in 
trade with the Indians, and certain people in Lon- 
don enjoyed a monopoly of the Indian trade. So 
while the colonists were encouraged to make crude 
glass they were absolutely forbidden to make beads 
and bangles of it. That must be done in England. 




Spinning flax. 

Under a like impulse the English law encouraged, 
with tobacco bounties, the manufacture of linen on 
this side of the ocean, simply because there was no 
great interest in England in such manufacture. 
And in the same way England encouraged the pro- 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 19 

duction here of ship stores, by Hberal bounties. 
But the EngHsh laws at the same time forbade the 
manufacture of woolen cloths here, on the ground 
that the colonists should buy such cloths from Eng- 
land. In brief, the English laws encouraged the col- 
onists to do the best they could for themselves so 
long as they did not compete with British interests. 
Beyond that line the English law said "Nay!" to 
colonial enterprise. 

All these are illustrative examples only. We 
have already seen, in " Our First Century," how res- 
olutely the colonists acted upon their own impulses, 
and in answer to their own needs. In spite of the 
laws, which for a long time were not rigorously en- 
forced, they converted their crude iron into such 
utensils as they needed. In spite of the foreign law 
they made woolen clothing for themselves. Even 
in the very earliest days of the Virginia colony a re- 
strictive law did not prevent the colonists from mak- 
ing glass beads and trading them to the Indians for 
corn. 

All these things tended to the ultimate establish- 
ment of American liberty and independence. These, 
and like things, were causes of friction, and out of 
that friction came revolt and revolution quite as a 
matter of course. The colonies had been planted 



20 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



in America for the benefit of English companies and 
EngHsh Lords Proprietors and EngHsh manufac- 
turers and the English King. The colonists had 
conquered a wilderness and created an empire. 




Spinning wool. 

They very naturally desired to reap for themselves 
the harvest of the planting they had done at so great 
a cost of hardship, suffering, danger and limitless toil. 
There was in the future inevitable war between 
these two aims and aspirations, though that war was 



DAWN OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 21 

long delayed in its coming. It is the purpose of 
this volume to tell how events slowly led up to the 
outbreak. 

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, there 
was no thought of other than local independence In 
the colonies. The colonists already had grievances, 
but the idea of final and resolute revolt had not yet 
been born in their minds. All that came later. In 
the meanwhile, as we shall see in later chapters of 
this volume, they were beset by difficulties and dan- 
gers sufficient to occupy their attention to the ut- 
most limit. 



CHAPTER II 

FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 

DURING the first half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, two influences were at work that vitally 

afi^ected the character and history of the colo- 
nies. One of these was a succession of wars between 
the Englishmen in America, and the French and 
Spanish with their Indian allies. These wars, ot 
which the details are so fully given in all the school 
histories that they need not be repeated here except 
in barest outline, vexed the colonies and sorely 
afflicted the colonists. They cost many lives and 
much treasure ; thev involved the destruction of 
many outlying towns and the ravaging of many 
farms, whose men, women and children were butch- 
ered indiscriminately. But the wars served to 
strengthen the colonies, and especially to breed 
among the people a spirit of self-reliance and self- 
confidence which served them in good stead when 
the time came, later in the century, for the final 
struggle for independence. They taught the colo- 

23 



FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 



23 



nies that they could stand alone and take care of 
themselves. More important still, they accustomed 
the colonists to think of America, rather than of 




Map illustrating the French and Indian Wars. 



24 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

England, as their own country. The subtle influ- 
ence of this changed habit of mind is clearly seen 
in the steady and continuous growth of the spirit of 
independence, which we shall trace as we go on with 
the story. 

The first of these French and Indian wars — 
known in history as King William's War — came to 
an end in 1697, just before the dawn of the eigh- 
teenth century. In the making of peace, unfortu- 
nately for the colonists, the English government gave 
up all that the Americans had won for themselves by 
their heroic endeavors and still more heroic sacrifices. 
The French were left in possession of all the terri- 
tory they had ever held in America, and they were 
free to continue their policv of pushing their trading 
posts into the great fertile region west of the moun- 
tains, a region which they already claimed as their 
own. It is true that the English colonists had not 
yet begun to go into that country to any considerable 
extent, and so, for the time being at least, the French 
advance into it gave the colonists no trouble. But 
statesmanship must even then have foreseen those 
later consequences which proved so hazardous to 
the growth of the English settlements. 

The peace made in 1697, lasted no more than 
five years. In 1702, upon Oueen Anne's accession 



FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 25 

to the English throne, war broke out anew between 
England and France, and it involved the English 
and French colonies in America, as a matter of 
course. At the same time the Spanish assailed the 
Americans, thus doubly endangering the English 
colonies. The French lay north of New England, 
while the Spanish lay south of the Carolinas, and 
both were aided by savage Indian allies. 

The war lasted for eleven years, in- 

volving much of slaughter, especially 

'^j in the New England colonies which 

"^^'r^f were continually ravaged. It ended 

"^ L^ ^t last, however, with distinct advan- 

^SZ'^'^ W ^^S^ ^° ^^^ English colonists. At the 

^''' south a Spanish expedition against 

1-' Charleston was beaten off, and the 

Carolinians under Colonel Moore 

conquered and permanently held all 

that part of what was then Florida, 

Queen Anne. i • i • r i 

which now constitutes most or the 
State of Georgia, At the north, the English colo- 
nists, with the assistance of English war ships, again 
conquered Acadia and when peace was made the 
English retained control of that region, restoring to it 
its old name of Nova Scotia, and changing the name 
of its capital from Port Royal to Annapolis Royal. 



26 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

The peace made in 17 13 lasted until 1744, but 
only in a half peaceful way, so far as the French and 
English in America were concerned. So long as 
England and France were at peace on the other side 
of the ocean, their colonies in America were forbidden 
to make war upon each other. But the hostility 




Acadia, Port Royal and Louisboiirg and the route by sea 
between Boston and Quebec. 

between them remained in full force, and the French 
not only encouraged Indian incursions into the Eng- 
lish colonies, but furnished French leaders for such 
irruptions. 

The other influence to which reference has been 



FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 



27 



made as one vitally affecting the future of this 
country, was the large and varied immigration that 
poured into the colonies during the first half of the 
eighteenth century. That immigration not only in- 
creased the numerical strength of the colonists but 
it brought with it new ideas and new modes of liv- 
ing which had their influence upon life in America. 
During the earlier colonial period, including 
nearly the whole of the seventeenth century, nearly 




Old Swedish Church, Wilmington, Del. 

all the immigrants who had come to the English 
colonies, except the Dutch in New York and a 
small number of Swedes, were Englishmen. But 
near the end of the seventeenth century a new and 
important inflow began, which continued, in greater 
or less force, for more than forty years. 



28 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

There were many little sects in Germany who, 
upon religious grounds, were averse to war and who 
therefore desired to escape from a country in which 
every man was expected to serve as a soldier. These 
sects were persecuted for their religion and addition- 
ally upon the ground that they refused to do the work 
of soldiers. There were still other Germans who 
for political reasons came to America. Atone time 
as many as thirteen thousand of them removed from 
the Palatinate of the lower Rhine to England and 
asked the government there to send them to Amer- 
ica. They were sent to many of the colonies and 
scattered through them. They gave an impulse of 
German ideas, and German civilization, and German 
ways of living, to the communities in which they 
settled. It is noteworthy that many years later, 
when the time came for real fighting to be done, for 
real principle, these Germans proved to be excellent 
soldiers in spite of the prejudice that many of them 
felt against war. 

In the early part of the eighteenth century a con- 
siderable number of Germans immigrated into New 
York. They became dissatisfied with conditions 
there and a little later they removed themselves to 
Pennsylvania, where they were well received and 
where the spirit of the government accorded with 



FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 29 

their own. These Germans were the forefathers of 
the thrifty and sturdy Americans who were for long 
ignorantly called Pennsylvania Dutch. 

During this same period there began what after- 
ward became a very large immigration of men and 
women who were commonly known as Scotch-Irish. 
They were properly not Irishmen and Irishwomen 
in blood but Scotchmen and 
Scotchwomen. They were 
Presbyterians whose fore- 
fathers had removed them- 
selves from Scotland to the 
north of Ireland where they 
had engaged in the business 
of manufacturing linen. 
That industry was an un- 
certain one at that time, so 
that many of these so-called 
Scotch-Irish were often 
thrown out of work by reason of a depression in the 
linen industry. Many of them managed to emigrate 
to America where they introduced the linen industry 
and the cultivation of the potato. 

The so-called Irish potato is one of the note- 
worthy American contributions to the sustenance of 
man. But it was probably not found in a wild state 




An early printing press. 



30 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

anywhere within the borders of what we now know 
as the United States. It was found growing wild 
in Central and South America and was taken thence 
to Ireland where its enormous fruitfulness made it a 
principal crop. The Scotch-Irish who came to the 
English colonies in America brought it with them 
and introduced its culture here. That is why we 
call it the Irish potato. 

These Scotch-Irish immigrants settled themselves 
in all the colonies, but particularly in Pennsylvania, 
where, as early as 1729, five thousand of them lo- 
cated themselves in Philadelphia. This immigration 
proved afterwards to be of the utmost advantage to 
the colonists. The Scotch-Irishmen were good 
fighters, as Scotchmen and Irishmen have always 
been throughout the world. They were an ener- 
getic race, eager to push into the wilderness and 
ready to accept any hardships or dangers they might 
be called upon to endure and to open up the new 
regions to settlement by virtue of their courage, 
their determination, and that which we call " pluck." 

Another valuable class of immigrants had come 
into this country about the end of the seventeenth 
century. These were the Huguenots, or French 
Protestants, who were driven out of France by the 
religious persecutions and civil wars of that time, 



FIRST HALF OF THE CENTURY 31 

and who came in large numbers to the EngHsh colo- 
nies in America. They settled in all of the colonies 
but mainly in South Carolina, where they became the 
aristocrats and the wealthiest people of a later time 
in spite of the fact that they had come to America 
completely stripped of all their possesions and ut- 
terly impoverished. To this day, on the coast of 
South Carolina, the names of the great landholders 
and the great families are mainly Huguenot names. 
It will be observed that all these immigrants — 
Germans, Scotch-Irish and Huguenots^quitted 
their native lands and came to America, just as the 
Puritans, and the Cavaliers, and the Quakers, and the 
Catholics had done, because they were discontented 
with their lot, and mainly because of religious perse- 
cution. Thus practically all the American colonists 
were men in revolt against oppression, men whose 
all-controlling impulse and inspiration was a love of 
liberty and a fixed purpose to assert and maintain 
the right of men to govern themselves. Of such 
seed our country came. 



CHAPTER III 



THE GEORGIA COLONY 



NOTWITHSTANDING Colonel Moore's 
conquest of that part of the original Florida 
which at present constitutes almost all of 
the State of Georgia, the Spanish in Florida con- 
tinued to claim not only the whole of what we now 
call Georgia, but the whole of South Carolina as 
well, contending that it was Spanish territory. They 
were always ready to right for it when occasion 
offered. 

In view of this situation General James Ogle- 
thorpe — an English military man of distinction — 
concluded that it would be well to plant a military 
colony south of South Carolina, in that part of the 
country which Colonel Moore had conquered, in 
order to provide for the permanent military pro- 
tection of the Carolinas against Spanish invasion. 

He had other ideas in mind also. He was at 
once a military man and a philanthropist. As a 
military man he wanted to defend the Carolinas 
32 



THE GEORGIA COLONY 33 

against Spanish aggression. As a philanthropist he 
wanted to do some other things. In 1732 he se- 
cured from King George II of England a grant, to 



General James Oglethorpe. 

himself and his associates, of that part of South 
Carolina which lay between the Savannah and the 
c 



34 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Altamaha Rivers — substantially that region which 
now constitutes the State of Georgia by virtue of 
the fact that Oglethorpe gave it that name in honor 
of his king. 

Unlike all those others who had become proprie- 
tors in America, Oglethorpe and his associates had 
no thought of personal profit in securing this terri- 
-tory. It was his primary purpose to establish in 
that region a philanthropic colony — a colony in 
which poor men who had failed in England might 
begin life anew. As he himself declared, he and his 
associates purposed to hold the land " in trust for 
the poor." 

He lavishly expended his own wealth in satisfy- 
ing the creditors of prisoners for debt in England and 
in removing them to his colony where they might 
hope to build up fortunes for themselves. " Not 
for self but for others," is a literal translation of 
the Latin motto he adopted for his enterprise. This 
he put upon the seal of his colony, together with 
a device of silkworms engaged in spinning ; for it 
was a part of his purpose to make of Georgia a 
source of silk supply, so that England might not be 
further dependent upon Italy and the Orient for the 
raw materials of silk manufacture. 

Landing at Charleston, Oglethorpe began his 



THE GEORGIA COLONY 



35 



colonization at Savannah in 1733 with one hundred 
and sixteen persons as his followers. He had ar- 
ranged for other colonists to follow him in rapid 
succession and they did so. Among them was a 
regiment of Scotch Highlanders, upon whom he de- 
pended to defend the border and 
^^vanLhi:;^ to give a military character to his 
colony from the, first. He also 
brought out twenty Jewish fami- 
lies, escaping from persecution, 
and a number of Protestants from 
Germany. His views were liberal 
if we measure them by the stan- 
dards of that time. He accepted 
Jews and men of every Protestant 
sect. But he placed a ban upon 
Roman Catholics and unbelievers, 
excluding them from his settle- 
ments. 
Oglethorpe was a domineering person of a mili- 
tary type who insisted upon having his own way in 
everything. The Indians liked him, partly because 
he treated them fairly, paying them a proper price 
for such lands of theirs as he wished to occupy, and 
partly because of his soldierly endurance of hard- 
ship. The Indians always admire courage and 




Georgia and Florida 
as they were in Ogle- 
thorpe's time. 



30 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

" grit " wherever they see them and they found 
Oglethorpe a man to be admired. 

But Hke many others who planned colonies in 
America, Oglethorpe undertook to rule too much. 
He allowed his colonists no voice whatever in the 
government of the community in which they lived. 
He allowed no man to own any land in his own right. 
He assigned to each of them fifty acres of ground, 
a space which was utterly insufficient to provide 
for the needs of a family, if we reflect that a certain 
part of the land must be held in forest for the 
furnishing of fuel, a certain other part must be de- 
voted to the support of farm animals, only a small 
remainder being left for crop cultivation. 

Worse still, the fifty acres granted to each colonist 
were not granted in fee simple. The colonist could 
not sell an acre of it or even rent an acre. At his 
death he could not transmit his land equitably to 
his children. By Oglethorpe's decree, at the death 
of each landholder his land was given to his eldest 
son or, if he had no son, it reverted to the trustees 
of the colony, the wife and daughters losing every- 
thing. No man was permitted to control more 
than fifty acres unless he brought into the colony, 
at his own expense, enough white servants to culti- 
vate the surplus area. 



THE GEORGIA COLONY 37 

As it was Oglethorpe's purpose to establish a 
military colony, and seemingly for that reason only, 
he decreed that no negro slaves should be held 
within its borders. His idea was that he wanted 
there only white men who could be depended 
upon to serve as soldiers and thus to maintain 
Georgia's military power as a defence against the 
Spanish. 

These restrictions operated detrimentally to the 
prosperity of the colony. As the people could not 
own their lands or hold more than fifty acres apiece, 
even as renters, they had no inducement to improve 
their property or to extend their estates. As their 
cultivation of the soil was in direct competition with 
that of the Carolinas and Virginia, where negro 
slaves were by that time held in considerable num- 
bers, the prohibition of slavery placed them at 
serious economic disadvantage. So seriously did this 
embarrass the progress of the colony indeed that in 
1749 the rule against negro slavery was abrogated 
and Georgia became a colony with slavery as a 
recognized part of its institutions. Three years 
later the colony became a royal one and remained 
so until the Revolutionary War. That is to say, 
it passed out of Oglethorpe's control and into that 
of the King of England, who allowed the colonists 



38 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

to own their land and transmit it to their children. 
Under this wiser rule the colony rapidly became 
prosperous and it served from beginning to end of 
the colonial period as a barrier against Spanish in- 
vasion of the Carolinas. 



CHAPTER IV 

LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 

THERE were very marked differences between 
life in South Carolina and life in Oglethorpe's 
Georgia colony although they adjoined each 
other. Among the Carolina colonists there had 
been a large number of well-to-do Englishmen who 
came out with wealth enough to take up great areas 
of land, to establish vast plantations upon such land 
and to build there mansions for their occupation — 
some of brick and some of splendidly hewn timber 
— which should be as dear to them as the historic 
homes of England were to their owners. They 
had surrounded themselves with negro servants in 
considerable numbers and they had established them- 
selves in state as lords of the soil and gentlemen of 
consequence in the colony. 

These gentlemen lived in stately — almost lordly — 

fashion. Their plantations were immense in extent. 

Their house grounds were often so large as to admit 

of live oak avenues a mile long, leading from the 

39 



40 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

outer gates to the portals of the mansion. In 
the mansion itself the rooms were spacious and 
the halls immense. In the rooms and the halls 
alike there were great fireplaces which in cold 
weather blazed with logs of fat pine five or 
six feet long. The floors were made of the hard, 
resinous, long-leafed pine of that country, and 
were polished every morning by a rubbing down 
with pine needles. The furniture was of rosewood, 
or mahogany, or cedar, and it also was polished 
daily by negro servants with wax and great blocks 
of cork. These processes would be expensive in 
any modern community, but in that time, when labor 
was abundant and cost next to nothing, they were 
easily managed. 

The most productive plantations in South Caro- 
lina were those which lay either upon the sea islands 
or in the low country between the sea islands and 
the pine lands above. It had early been found that 
these low countries were so far malarious that white 
men could not safely live there between June and 
November and so almost every planter in those 
regions maintained a little summer place, up in the 
pines, where there were no black sands, no long gray 
moss, and no live oak trees, the absence of these 
things indicating also the absence of malaria. 



LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 41 

The live oak tree was the glory of the low coun- 
try plantations. Great avenues of those trees were 
festooned with gray moss, which hung often even 




A plantation gateway, entrance to the estate of William Byrd at 
Westover, Va, 



42 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

to the ground. But in summer and autumn the 
planter found it necessary to remove the white por- 
tion of his family either to Charleston or to the 
pine lands. The shell cottages that served as sum- 
mer homes were often adorned with rich works of 
art brought over from England. 

Of course these rich planters were few in number. 
There were many poorer families in South Carolina 
who lived in much simpler ways than this, but it 
was the nabobs of that country who gave character 
to Its life. 

The sports of that region were such as had been 
imported from England — horse racing and hunting 
being chief among them. 

■ The great plantations lay originally along the 
water courses with which that region is intricately 
interlaced. This was partly because the lands along 
these water courses were the most fruitful ones and 
partly because the water courses, all of which were 
navigable by sloops, afforded an easy means of com- 
munication with Charleston, which was at once the 
political and social capital of the colony and the 
market for all the products of the region round 
about. 

The settlers in Georgia were mainly of a different 
class. Oglethorpe had taken pains that they should 



LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 43 

be chiefly poor, hard working men fit for military- 
duty, and his system tended to keep them. poor. 
They hved far more simply than the Carolinians 




Carved doorway, Bull Pringle Mansion, Charleston, S. C. 



did and far less pretentiously. They were farmers 
rather than planters and even after the restriction of 
land ownership to fifty acres was set aside they were 



44 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

still, in the main, small landholders toiling hard for 
their subsistence. 

Two things occurred during the seventeenth cen- 
tury which not only encouraged but rendered almost 
necessary the South Carolina method of planting 
and living. 

In the year 1696 some rice was planted by one 
Thomas Smith in a Charleston garden. The seed 
came from Madagascar, but it found a congenial 
home on the South Carolina coast. A little later 
the culture of that grain became general along the 
coast and was encouraged by many circumstances. 
The lands that lay between the sea islands and the 
higher ground on the west were so nearly flat that 
they lent themselves perfectly to rice culture. They 
were divided into vast fields, separated from each 
other by dams. It was easy to flood the field near- 
est the higher lands so long as it neecied to be 
flooded, and it was equally easy by opening a flood- 
gate to draw the water from that field into the next 
one, when its time of flooding should come. In 
brief, the conditions of rice culture on the coast of 
South Carolina were the most perfect that have ever 
been known in the world, and rice quickly became 
the staple crop of that region, attaining there a per- 
fection which has been known nowhere else in the 



LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 45 

world. This was the beginning of CaroHna's pros- 
perity. 

There were many fields of course that were not 
adapted to the cultivation of rice of a superior qual- 
ity, and the Carolinians were deeply concerned to 
find some other staple crop that should enable them 
to make the most of their possessions. The cotton 
gin, it will be remembered, had not yet been in- 
vented and for lack of it the cultivation of cotton 
was unprofitable because of the enormous labor cost 
of separating the seed from the lint. 

In 1739 a brilliant young woman, who afterwards 
became the mother of some of Carolina's greatest 
revolutionary men, solved this crop problem in a 
most interesting way. This young woman was 
Eliza Lucas, afterwards Eliza Pinckney. Her 
father was the English governor of a West Indian 
Island. He owned three great plantations on the 
Carolina coast not far from Charleston, and his 
daughter was sent to manage them. 

She was a young woman of culture — though she 
spelled abominably — and of limitless aspirations for 
culture. She studied music diligently, and sent all 
over the world for musical publications that might 
help her in that study. While busying herself with 
her music, her reading, and her social duties, which 



46 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

were extensive, she managed her three plantations 
with a skill which has rarely been equaled. She 
not only directed the planting and the growing of 
the crops and superintended their sale, but she man- 
aged also the fleet of sloops and schooners belong- 
ing to her, by which she shipped the products of 
the plantations to Charleston for sale. She was in- 
deed a wonderful woman, as her letters, some of 
which have been preserved and published by her 
descendant, Mrs. Ravenel, abundantly attest. 

This energetic young woman made up her mind, 
about 1739, to introduce into South Carolina the 
culture of indigo on lands unfit for the growing of 
rice in its perfection. She secured the necessary 
seeds. She lost her first crop by frost and her 
second by worms, but she succeeded in bringing the 
third to a perfection of growth that entirely satisfied 
her ambition. But to grow the indigo plant is one 
thing and to make the indigo dye from it is another 
and much more difficult one. So Eliza Lucas sent 
to her father for an expert in that process to aid her 
in converting the fruitage of her fields into a market- 
able commodity. 

This man played her false. He knew how to 
prepare the dye from the plant, but he deliberately 
spoiled results in carrying on the process. Eliza 



LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 47 

Lucas always thought this was because he feared the 
competition of the CaroHnian indigo industry with 
the indigo industry of his own island in the West 
Indies. However that may be, he utterly spoiled 
the product. But Eliza Lucas was a determined 
young woman. Even through her agent's failure, 
she managed somehow to learn his art. Then she 
sent him "packing" back to his West India island 
and proceeded to convert her own crop into a supe- 
rior quality of indigo manufactured by herself. 

She worked over this problem for several years, 
and by the year 1745 she had fully introduced the 
culture and manufacture of indigo into South Caro- 
lina so that two years later no less than two hundred 
thousand pounds of the precious dyestufF were 
shipped to England, returning a great sum of money 
as its price. 

This industry was an enormous boon to South 
Carolina for nearly half a century afterward. It con- 
tinued until the invention of the cotton gin made 
cotton culture a more profitable thing in the hands 
of the very ignorant plantation laborers of that time. 

The cultivation of indigo did not entirely cease, 
indeed, until nearly the time of the beginning of our 
Civil War in 1861. Perhaps it would never have 
been abandoned at all except upon grounds of hu- 



48 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

manity. It was found after awhile, by planters in 
the South, that the negroes who worked in indigo 
became specially subject to pulmonary consumption 
by inhaling the extremely fine dust of the dye, and 
in order to spare their lives one planter after another 
gave up the culture of that plant. 

From the time (1670), when the Westoes Indians 
so nearly destroyed the colony of Carolina, until 
171 1, that colony was comparatively free from 
trouble with the Indians. But there was one warlike 
tribe, the Tuscaroras, in North Carolina, which 
looked jealously upon the rapid growth of the white 
men's plantations. This tribe, although 
far removed in distance, belonged in fact 
to the Iroquois, whose Five Nations oc- 
cupied northern New York. In 171 1 
the Tuscaroras made fierce war upon the Indian mocca- 
North Carolina settlements. ^^"^• 

For nearly two years there was serious danger 
that the northern part of the Carolina colony would 
be completely destroyed. The Virginians and the 
Carolinians of the southern part of the colony, how- 
ever, came to the assistance of their brethren in what 
is now North Carolina and, with the aid of the 
Yemassee Indians, succeeded at last in completely 
routing the Tuscaroras. 




LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 49 

After the manner of that time many of the In- 
dians were captured and sold into West Indian 
slavery. But a large part of the tribe of Tuscaroras 
escaped and made its way to New York, where it 
became the Sixth nation of the Iroquois Confed- 
eracy. 

Two years later another Indian war occurred in 
which the Yemassees, who had aided the whites 
against the Tuscaroras, were the chief enemies of 
the whites. This war was brought about by Spanish 
influence from Florida and six or seven thousand 
Indian warriors were engaged in it. It brought 
upon South Carolina the most serious danger that 
that colony had ever encountered from the Indians. 
The Carolinians could bring against the six or 
seven thousand Indians no more than seventeen 
hundred men, two or three hundred of whom were 
negroes. For in that day and long afterwards ne- 
groes were freely employed as soldiers, and the law 
of South Carolina made it a penal offence for the 
owner of any negro slave to refuse his services to 
the country as a soldier. After a desperate struggle, 
which endured during three years, the Indians were 
at last beaten and from that time forward the colony 
remained at peace. 

At first the whole of Carolina was regarded as a 

D 



50 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

single province and was owned by a single set of 
proprietors in England. Because of the great ex- 
tent of the province, however, the proprietors almost 
from the first governed the northern and southern 
portions separately, under different agents of their 
own. They governed very badly and from the be- 
ginning there was constant discontent with their rule 
among the South Carolina colonists. These were 
almost always engaged in a quarrel of some kind 
with the proprietors because of their arbitrary meas- 
ures^ most of which of course were inspired by the 
complete ignorance which prevailed in London as 
to the conditions and needs of the colony in Amer- 
ica. 

At last, in 1719, the South Carolina colonists 
became so angry with their foreign proprietary rulers 
that they went into something like rebellion. They 
appealed to the king in that year and asked him to 
take the government of the colony away from the 
English company and to assume control himself, 
making of South Carolina a royal province. After 
two years of controv^ersy with the proprietors the 
king bought out their interests and sent over a 
royal governor to take control of the colony in his 
name. 

This purchase afterward included the rights of the 



LIFE IN GEORGIA AND CAROLINAS 51 

proprietors in both halves of the CaroHna province 
and the king divided them into two colonies, North 
and South Carolina, South Carolina became a 
royal province at once, and in 1729 North Carolina 
also was placed under a royal governor. 



CHAPTER V 

FURTHER WARS OF COLONISTS 

DURING the colonial period in America, Eng- 
land, France, and Spain were almost continu- 
ally at war one with the other. It was a period 
in which dissension was rife and there was always a 
» cause for war ready at hand when any monarch had a 
fancy for that sort of employment of his revenues and 
his people. The interests of trade had not yet as- 
serted themselves. Men had not yet learned the les- 
son they have learned in our later day, that war is al- 
ways a costly indulgence and that it always ends in loss 
for both the nations engaged in it. They had not 
yet learned that it is better for nations to trade with 
each other than to fight each other. They had not 
yet learned even the primer lessons of political 
economy. 

So in 1739 England and Spain went to war again. 
As we have seen, General Oglethorpe had established 
his military colony in Georgia with a primary pur- 
pose of fighting the Spaniards and defending the 
52 



FURTHER WARS OF COLONISTS 53 




Gateway at St. Augustine, Fla. 



54 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Carolinas against them. Accordingly he embraced 
this opportunity to send an expedition into Florida. 
His movement was successful for a time but after 
awhile he found himself overmatched and withdrew 
his forces. A few months later he led a second ex- 
pedition into Florida and hammered for awhile at 
the gates of St. Augustine. The Spaniards proved 
to be too strongly entrenched for him to conquer 
them and so at last he withdrew. 

In 1742 the Spaniards in their turn took the of- 
fensive and invaded Georgia with the purpose of re- 
conquering that region and making it again part of 
their Florida possessions. Their forces outnumbered 
Oglethorpe's and their resources were far greater than 
his. But Oglethorpe was a man of large ability and 
great skill in manoeuvering. He succeeded in am- 
bushing the Spaniards and routing them. His suc- 
cesses in this way practically ended the war, so far 
as the American possessions were concerned, and 
permanently secured Georgia to the English. 

Two years later, in 1744, there came a war be- 
tween France and England. This war is known 
in history as King George's War and it resulted in 
a good deal of trouble for the northern colonies in 
America. 

The first effort of the French in America was to 



FURTHER WARS OF COLONISTS 



55 



retake Annapolis Royal, which had formerly been 
called Port Royal, in Acadia. There was a resolute 
man at the head of the government of Massachusetts, 
at that time — Governor Shirley — and he determined 
from the first not only to defend Nova Scotia but 
to take the aggressive and, if possible, conquer the 
great French fortress on Cape Breton Is- 
land, called Louisburg. With the single 
exception of Quebec, Louisburg was the 
very strongest French fortress in America. 
The possession of that place by the French 
was a special menace to the New England 
colonies for the reason that French priva- 
teer ships in great numbers were sent out 
from the harbor of Louisburg to prey 
upon the commerce of the New England- 
ers. These privateers were little better 
than pirates. Their business was to cap- 
ture merchant ships and make spoil of a French 
them and of their cargoes. But at that ^^^^ ^^' 
time this modified species of piracy was still every- 
where recognized as a legitimate agency in war. 

The operations of these privateers seriously in- 
terfered not only with the fishing industries of New 
England but with the commerce of that region with 
other countries of the world. Wherever a Yankee 




56 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

ship was found at sea, and a French privateer could 
conquer and capture it, the ship and its cargo be- 
came a prize, and its officers and crew prisoners of 
war. 

Governor Shirley's idea was to defend New 
England by an offensive movement against Louis- 
burg. If he could capture the fortress there and 
break up this nest of quasi-p'irates he would thereby 
do more for the defence of New England against 
the French than could be done by any number of 
successes on land. 




Old house at Deerfield. 



The New England boys and young men, trained 
as they were to sea service, and full as they were of 
spirit, volunteered for this service as freely as their 
governor desired. After a httle Governor Shirley 



FURTHER WARS OF COLONISTS 57 

got together a fleet of transports loaded with soldiers 
ready for action, together with another fleet of armed 
vessels whose duty it was to protect the transports. 
Thus equipped he sent his force, under command 
of Pepperell, to besiege Louisburg and after a six 
weeks' struggle they captured that stronghold on 
the 17th of June, 1745. 

The news of this victory was received everywhere 
in New England and equally in the southern colonies 
with rejoicing. It was clearly seen that this cap- 
ture of Louisburg practically made an end of the 
power of the French in Canada to harass the coasts 
or the shipping of the English colonies. It was 
clearly seen that with Louisburg in possession the 
Yankees were masters of the situation and of the 
sea. 

But three years later, when England and France 
concluded to m^ake a peace with each other, the in- 
terests of the colonists were utterly disregarded, as 
they had been many times before, and the English 
gave Louisburg back to the French, thus reestablish- 
ing north of the New England colonies a hornet's 
nest of aggression and depredation. 

If we would understand the history of that time 
we must constantly bear in mind that the wars be- 
tween England and France were undertaken solely 



58 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



for purposes relating to European difficulties. We 
must remember that in England the American 
colonies were considered as outlying settlements of 
no consequence whatever, whose most vital interests 
might be freely sacrificed in an effort to secure good 
terms between France and England with regard to 
European matters. 

It is safe to say that if the English 
had not given up Louisburg after the 
colonists had conquered it, the colo- 
nists would have been spared the 
greatest and most dangerous war in 
which they were at any time engaged 
and would have had comparatively 
little difficulty in destroying the 
French power and establishing Eng- 
lish dominion west of the Alleghen- 
ies. 

It was inevitable that able men in the colonies 
should see and understand these conditions. And 
their seeing and understanding of such conditions in- 
evitably led their minds to question the wisdom and 
the value of English dominion in the colonies. In 
other words, the better minds among the men who 
had created an English nation in America were forced 
to ask themselves from time to time whether it might 




A French 
officer. 



FURTHER WARS OF COLONISTS 59 

not be desirable to sever the relations that bound 
them to the parent country. They got little if 
anything of advantage from that relation. They got 
much of disadvantage from it, especially in such cases 
as this. By their energy and valor they had won 
possession of a fortress which constituted the key 
of the situation. They had made themselves in- 
deed masters of the problem that lay before them 
— the problem of English competition with French 
enterprise on this continent. It was not only a 
humiliation to them, but also a grievance of the 
most extreme kind that a power essentially foreign 
to themselves and indifferent to their interests should, 
for its own trading purposes, give up all that they 
had won by sacrifice and courage, and relegate them 
again to a position of helplessness and constant 
danger. 

But the thought of independence was not yet born 
among the people generally in America. The men 
who suffered this and other wrongs for nearly a 
generation afterward were too loyal to the crown to 
think as yet of the only remedy that was possible — 
namely, the remedy of independence. They were 
still disposed to " suffer and be strong" in their 
loyalty to England. But their wrongs were slowly 
driving them toward this thought of revolt, which 



60 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

culminated at last in the American Revolution. It 
is interesting to trace the birth and growth of this 
sentiment as a natural human protest against injustice. 
That is what the American Revolution, when it came, 
was and meant. 

The colonies had been grievously oppressed for 
years before they went into revolt. They had en- 
dured all with a patience which is positively astonish- 
ing to us in this later time. But they remained 
loyal to the mother country till they were at last 
fairly driven into a revolution which they had strug- 
gled to avoid. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR 

THUS far the English settlements lay almost 
entirely east of the Allegheny mountains. A 
rich territory lay beyond into which it was 
quite inevitable that the enterprising colonists should 
wish to push their way. 

In the very year (1748), in which King George's 
War ended, a company was formed in Virginia to 
make settlements beyond the mountains in what was 
then known as the Ohio country — namely, the re- 
gion lying along the upper waters of the Ohio and 
now included in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia 
and Indiana. All that region was claimed by Vir- 
ginia as a part of her territory. It was Virginia, 
therefore, under authority of the king, which granted 
to the Ohio Company five hundred thousand acres 
of land on the Ohio River. It was stipulated 
in the grant that the company should settle not less 
than one hundred families upon its lands within 
seven years. Two years later (1750), one Christo- 

61 



02 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



pher Gist, a man expert in such matters, was sent 
out to explore the country and select localities for 
the settlements that were to be made. 

But all this country was claimed also by the 
French, and they were not disposed to permit emi- 
grants from the English colonies to 
settle there. Accordingly, in 1749, 
the French Governor of Canada sent 
an expedition into the Ohio Valley 
which consisted of soldiers and In- 
dians. The people composing this ex- 
pedition went from Canada to the 
Allegheny River and thence down the 
Ohio. They carried a number of 
leaden plates, on each of which was 
an inscription claiming all the region 
watered by the Ohio and its tributaries. These 
plates were buried in the earth at various points 
near the mouths of streams tributary to the Ohio. 
The last of them was buried near the present site of 
Cincinnati. 

All this, of course, was a ridiculous technicality, 
which the sturdy Virginians were not disposed to 
recognize as in any way binding upon themselves. 
They were resolute in. their determination to cross 
the mountains and settle in the Ohio country, which 




A Canadian 
soldier. 



FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR G3 

they claimed, without the formahty of burying 
leaden plates anywhere. 

It was an age of technicalities and the French es- 
pecially were technical in their proceedings. La 
Salle, in 1682, had set up a monument at the mouth 
of the Mississippi River claiming, for the French 
king, dominion over all the region watered by that 
river and all its tributaries; and the French insisted 
upon the validity of that slenderly founded claim. 

The English colonists in Virginia and in the re- 
gion south of Virginia were far less disposed to re- 
spect technicalities of this kind. They 
held that by virtue of Cabot's discov- 
eries, the English owned all that region, 
from sea to sea, and that by virtue of 
kingly grants to the English colonies 
these colonies had a right to control ^, , , 

^ Block house. 

and occupy the whole of it. 

The French governor of Canada, Duquesne, pres- 
ently recognized this disposition of the English and 
took more active means than the burying of plates, 
by way of securing French possession of the region 
in dispute. In 1753 he sent out an expedition and 
established military posts and built forts in the Ohio 
Valley and in the region between Canada and that 
valley. The men in charge of this expedition built a 




64 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

fort where Erie in Pennsylvania now stands, and an- 
other on the present site of Waterford in Pennsyl- 
vania. Further west they seized upon the house of 
an English trader and converted it into a French 
fort. 

At that point, Governor Dinwiddle, of Virginia, 
decided to interfere with the proceedings of the 
French. He called to his assistance, and sent out as 
his representative, a very enterprising and daring 
young man, named George Washington, who was 
only twenty-one years of age, but who knew by long 
experience how to live in the woods and the wil- 
derness and how to conduct a perilous expedition to 
a successful conclusion. He gave young Washing- 
ton a letter of remonstrance which he charged him 
to deliver to the French commander in the Ohio 
country. 

It was November when Washington set out 
upon this journey of hardship and extreme danger. 
He had with him two Indians and four white hunt- 
ers who, like himself, knew how to live in the woods. 
There were no supplies to be had upon the journey, 
except such as the woodlands might furnish, and the 
party must therefore carry with it its own food and 
everything else that it needed. 

On the way, Washington encountered Indians 



FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR 65 




George Washington. 



£ 



66 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

who were hostile to the English by reason of French 
influence, but his tact was sufficient to allay their 
hostility and to induce their chief to go with him to 
Fort Le Boeuf, near Lake Erie, There he delivered 
to the French commandant the letter of remonstrance 
from Governor Dinwiddie and after a day or two of 
delay he received a letter in reply. This was a sim- 
ple declaration that the French commander claimed 
French possession of all the region west of the moun- 
tains and that he declined to recognize any English 
right of settlement there. 

With this reply in hand Washington set out in 
midwinter to return to Virginia. 

He soon found it impossible, by reason of the 
condition of the snow and the soil, to go farther on 
horseback. He therefore left his party behind him 
and with only one companion — the hardy frontiers- 
man Christopher Gist — he set out on foot to march 
all the way to Virginia without even the aid of pack 
horses, without any cooking utensils, and with only 
such food as these two young men could carry on 
their persons. 

They were beset by hostile Indians, tortured by 
cold, and continually threatened with starvation. 
Still they persisted in their purpose and hurrying for- 
ward under threat of Indian massacre, crossing rivers 



FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR 67 

full of floating ice, upon rudely constructed rafts and 
often falling into the freezing water, they managed 
at last — after Gist's feet and hands were terribly 
frozen — to make their way back again to Virginia. 

Washington's personal reward for this splendid 
service was his appointment — mere boy that he was 
— to be Commander-in-chief of all the forces in 
Virginia which it was the Governor's purpose to send 
into the Ohio country to assert and maintain Vir- 
ginia's rights there. 

In all these colonial wars the Americans had only 
rudely undisciplined forces, while the French had 
for their service the best trained regular troops of a 
great military power. The American forces con- 
sisted in part of volunteers, brave fellows who fought 
well when they saw opportunity of winning, but who 
were subject to no discipline and who had never 
been trained in the art of war. They considered 
only immediate necessity, and when the foe was 
driven away from their own settlements they quitted 
the field and went home. The rest of the forces 
consisted of militiamen, called into service only un- 
der pressure of necessity. They too were disban- 
ded and sent home as soon as their local work of war 
was done. 

There was never any organized supply depart- 



LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



ment. The forces depended for subsistence upon 
what they could gather in the region round about 
them. 

It was not until the time of the Revolution that 
the regular forces, known as " continentals," were 
organized. 

The arms in use by the militia and volunteers 
were clumsy, muzzle-loading, flintlock guns of short 

range and inaccurate fire. 
The few field cannon were 
little three or six pounders, 
which could do no effective 
execution. 

Washington had in the 
meantime acquired a mastery 
of the geographic and military situation which en- 
abled him to point out at once the true policy of 
Virginia in the war which was obviously impending. 
He saw clearly, as nobody else had seen, up to that 
time, that the key to the Ohio country was that 
point at which the junction of smaller rivers formed 
the Ohio — the point where Pittsburg now stands. 
He immediately urged upon Governor Dinwiddle 
the importance of sending an expedition thitherto 
build a fort there to defend that commanding po- 
sition. 




A flintlock. 



FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR 69 

His advice was accepted and acted upon. An 
enterprising trader named William Trent was directed 
to raise a force of frontiersmen, to advance into the 
Ohio country, and to build a fort at the forks of the 
river. Trent promptly began the work, but two 
months later a French force, numbering about five 
hundred men, descended suddenly upon him and 
drove his little company of forty men away. The 




Fort Duquesne. 

French by this time had grasped Washington's idea 
and realized the strategic value of that position. 
They proceeded at once to build a very strong fort 
there which they called Fort Duquesne. 

In the meanwhile the young Commander-in-chief, 
George Washington, was sent out to assist Trent in 
building and defending the fort. Washington had 
with him a very small force, but while on his way 



70 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

he learned that Trent had been defeated and driven 
away from the position he had been ordered to oc- 
cupy. Washington therefore gave up the immedi- 
ate purpose of his expedition and advanced to a 
point about forty miles east of Fort Duquesne where 
the Ohio Company had established a storehouse. 
It v.as his purpose to fortify himself there and hold 
the position until reinforcements could come to him, 
after which he hoped to drive the French out of F^ort 
Duquesne. 

It took him fully two weeks to make this march, 
inasmuch as he had to cut a road through a very 
dense forest in order to carry his artillery and his 
wagons vvith him. At the end of that time he ar- 
rived at a place called Great Meadows. There he 
learned that some French soldiers were lurking sus- 
piciously within striking distance of his camp. Tak- 
ing fortv men with him he set out to find these 
Frenchmen and learn what their purpose was. It 
must be borne in mind that there was at this time 
no war between England and France and, therefore, 
that the English and French on the American con- 
tinent were forbidden by their home governments, 
to make war upon each other. But when Washing- 
ton appeared in the presence of the French soldiers, 
they assailed him quite as if war had been on, and a 



FIRST INDEPENDENT COLONIAL WAR 71 

sharp fight ensued. Ten of the Frenchmen were 
killed and twenty-two of them were captured. 

This was on the 28th day of May, 1754, and it 
was the beginning of what is known in history as the 
Great French and Indian War. 

Now that war was on, Washington saw that his 
little force was in serious danger of capture or de- 
struction. The French had forces enough within 
easy march of Great Meadows to overwhelm him 
completely. He set to work to defend himself as 
best he could by erecting a palisade and other de- 
fences and he sent couriers back to hurry up rein- 
forcements. He called his position Fort Necessity, 
for the reason that he was there only through neces- 
sity and not through choice. Unfortunately the 
reinforcements with which he had hoped to defend 
that position were lost to him by the death of their 
commander. Colonel Fry. They turned back 
and thus Washington was left with scarcely more 
than three hundred men, all told, with whose aid 
to defend himself against the much greater numbers 
of French and Indians who presently assailed him. 

In spite of the odds against him he fought for nine 
hours before surrendering, and when he surrendered 
he was still strong enough to exact good terms. It 
is to be noted that this was the only occasion in all 



72 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

George Washington's life on which he made any 
surrender whatever, although he was often confronted 
with enormously superior forces in positions, the na- 
ture of which would have prompted any lesser man 
to make terms with the enemy. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PROBLEM OF THE COLONIES BRADDOCK's 

BLUNDER 

NOW for the first time in their history the Eng- 
Hsh colonists were engaged in war on their 
own account against their French neighbors, 
without waiting for permission from the mother 
country. 

The EngHsh colonists vastly outnumbered the 
French in America. The French had enormously 
extended their posts, both of a military and of a 
trading sort, and had occupied an area of country 
many times greater than that held by the English, 
but their population on this continent was scarcely 
one tenth as great as that of the English colonists. 
If the English colonies had at that time been acting 
together as a unit their mastery of the situation would 
have been complete. They could have organized 
armies overwhelmingly superior to any that the 
French could bring to bear, and with their alliance 
with the Iroquois Six Nations they could have put 
more Indians into the field than the French could 

73 



74 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



possibly win to their service. But unhappily the 
colonies were in no way united. Each of them was 
as yet separated from all the rest and independent 
of all the rest. Each of them was looking out for 
its own interests and caring next to nothing for 
what might happen to sister colonies anywhere. 

In 1754, one of the 
wisest men in all 
America, Benjamin 
Franklin, clearly saw 
the danger of this sit- 
uation and made an 
earnest effort to meet 
it. He saw that the 
isolation of the colo- 
nies from each other 
left each of them in 
some degree helpless 
in the presence of any foe who might assail it, while 
if they had been united and acting together their de- 
fensive power would have been sufficient to enable 
them to defy any enemy that might threaten them. 
In the year mentioned a convention of represen- 
tatives from the several colonies was held at Albany 
in New York. The purpose of that convention 
was to make a treaty with the Iroquois Indians which 




Indian fur trader. 



PROBLEM OF THE COLONIES 75 

should ally them not only with New York but with 
all the English colonies in America. Incidentally 
the delegates consulted a good deal with reference 
to a plan, which Franklin submitted, for a permanent 
union of the colonies. His idea was to make of 
them, so far as external affairs were concerned, and 
particularly so far as defence against enemies was 
concerned, a single unit acting together for the com- 
mon good. 

Franklin's proposal amounted to this, that the 
several colonies should form themselves into a union 
for defence, creating a general government with 
power to conduct all affairs that concerned the col- 
onies generally, and particularly all wars that might 
threaten any of them ; and which should have power 
also to raise by taxation the money necessary for 
this purpose. He proposed to leave each colony 
free to manage its own affairs in all local concerns, 
just as the states of the union are now left free, while 
their general government cares for all matters of 
common interest and particularly for all matters of 
external policy. 

In substance Franklin's plan was closely akin to 
that which many years later was adopted in the Con- 
stitution of the United States of America, But the 
time was not yet ripe. The colonies were still 



76 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

jealous of each other and still jealous of their indi- 
vidual rights and interests. They continued to be 
so until long after the Revolutionary War was fought 
and won. 

Franklin's plan was approved by the convention 
and presented to the several colonies for acceptance, 
but the majority of them unwisely rejected it, as the 
English government also did. The colonies thought 
it gave too much of prerogative to the English king, 
while the English government held that it gave too 
much independence and democratic power to the 
colonists. As a consequence the colonies were left, 
each of them to fight out for itself this great French 
and Indian war which about that time fell upon 
them. 

As Virginia could not call upon the other colonies 
to assist her in her effort to conquer the Ohio country 
and to assert the right of the English to possession 
there. Governor Dinwiddie was forced to appeal to 
England for aid, in an enterprise which had in no 
way been authorized by the English government and 
which was undertaken in fact almost as a revolt 
against it. Yet the English government, in 1755, 
sent out General Braddock, a very capable officer, 
but a very arrogant and unteachable one, with a 
thousand men to help the Virginians. 



BRADDOCK'S BLUNDER 



77 



In one respect Braddock succeeded. He induced 
the colonies to act together in a war which threatened 
the destruction of all of them. He called a council 
of their governors and induced them to agree upon 
a united plan of campaign against the enemy. 

This plan was to assail the French at several dif- 
ferent points simultaneously. Governor Shirley of 




Line of Braddock's march. 



Massachusetts was charged with the duty of organ- 
izing expeditions, composed of New England and 
New York volunteers, against Acadia, Crown Point 
and Niagara. In the meanwhile General Braddock, 
with his thousand British regulars supported by a 
still greater number of Virginian volunteers, was to 
march against Fort Duquesne. 



78 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Braddock had a very long and difficult march to 
make over mountains and through woodlands where 
there were no roads, and across streams that were 
bridgeless. At the outset he encountered as his 
chief difficulty the lack of horses and wagons. Ap- 
parently none could be had for love or money, but 
this was chiefly owing to the fact that Braddock did 
not know how to set to work to secure what he 
wanted from the colonists. 

Then Franklin came to his aid and issued a call 
upon the farmers everywhere, from Pennsylvania to 
Virginia, to send in their wagons and horses for the 
use of the army. He, himself, undertook to, see 
that the horses and wagons should be paid for at 
rates which he published. The response was 
prompt and Franklin spent a small fortune of his 
own money — because there was no money in the 
army chest — in purchasing the needed horses and 
wagons. It was an act on his part of great self- 
sacrifice in behalf of the country, but when, later, he 
presented to the British authorities his bill for this 
expenditure of his private means, the officer who 
had charge of the matter immediately proposed to 
cut the bill in two, paying Franklin only one half 
of his demand. Franklin dignifiedly told him that 
his demand included not one dollar more than he 



BRADDOCK'S BLUNDER 79 

had expended in the pubHc behalf and that he 
thought it should be paid in full. With something 
like a wink the officer replied : 

"Oh, well, of course we know how these things 
are done. Of course you got something for your- 
self out of it." 

The result was that Franklin got back only about 
one half the money he had expended, but in his 
wonderful autobiography he manifests an amusement 
over the occurrence which perhaps compensated him 
almost as completely as the money would have 
done. 

Braddock profited also by George Washington's 
self-sacrifice in behalf of the public interest. He 
welcomed Washington's offer of service on his staff 
as an unpaid aid-de-camp. It is an interesting fact 
that from the beginning to the end of his career 
George Washington never accepted one dollar of 
pay or of subsequent reward for any service ren- 
dered to his country whether as a military officer, as 
president of the Convention that framed the Con- 
stitution, or as President of the United States for 
eight years. 

Washington did all he could to inform Braddock 
of the methods of Indian warfare — methods with 
which he was himself thoroughly familiar. He ex- 



80 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

plained to Braddock how the Indians fought irregu- 
larly, shooting from behind trees and other natural 
defences, and how impossible it was for troops 
formed in solid lines to combat with them. Brad- 
dock would not hear. It was not for him, a thor- 
oughly instructed British officer, to accept advice 
or information from a mere colonial like Washing- 
ton. He insisted therefore upon advancing and 
fighting according to the rules of tactics accepted 
and acted upon in European warfare. Very natur- 
ally he brought disaster upon himself. 

When within a few miles of the fort that he meant 
to assail, Braddock was met (July 9, 1755) by a force 
of French and Indians concealed behind trees and fir- 
ing vigorously from their cover. He still insisted 
upon keeping his men in regular ranks where they 
were easy marks for the enemy's riflemen. One after 
another of them went down like grass before a scythe 
and presently they fell into a panic and refused to 
be rallied by the utmost efforts that their officers 
could make. The English regulars simply broke 
ranks and ran away. They would have been utterly 
destroyed but for the courage and sagacity of Wash- 
ington and his Virginians. He and his Virginians 
knew how to fight Indians and they had all of res- 
olution that was necessary to protect this retreat of 



1 



BRADDOCK'S BLUNDER 



81 



the British regulars. They betook themselves to 
trees as the Indians were accustomed to do, and 
fought desperately there until the retreat was ac- 
complished. More than half of General Braddock's 
regulars were killed or wounded 
and General Braddock himself 
was pierced with a bullet that 
was destined to end his life. 

During all this time Wash- 
ington exposed himself reck- 
lessly upon horseback and twice 
durinor the mcl6e his horse was 
killed under him. Four bullets 
pierced his clothing, but he es- 
caped unhurt and in the end 
succeeded in covering Brad- 
dock's retreat so as to save it 

from becoming a complete dis- The situation of Crown 

Point. 

aster. 

The expeditions against Crown Point, a French fort 
on Lake Champlain, and against Niagara, were com- 
plete failures. Sir William Johnson led the first but 
got no further toward Crown Point than the south- 
ern end of Lake George. There he was attacked by 
Baron Dieskau whom he repulsed. But he lacked 
either the force, or the courage, or the enterprise, to 




82 LIFE IN THP: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



follow up his victory and so his expedition ended in 
nothing. Governor Shirley, in person, led an ex- 
pedition against Niagara but he also made a complete 
failure of the enterprise. 

Thus the campaign planned by Braddock in con- 
sultation with the governors of 
the colonies produced absolutely 
no results of value to the Eng- 
lish, except that it showed them 
the necessity of acting together 
in a common cause against a 
common enemy. 

But the war was still young 
and the English colonists were 
determined to win it. How 
their courage and their determination were rewarded 
later we shall see in another chapter. 

In the meanwhile one of the most picturesque in- 
cidents in American history had happened. As we 
remember, the v/hole French province of Acadia 
had been taken by the English and the colonists in 
1 710, and made an English province. The Aca- 
dians were mainly peasants, living a simple life, 
which Longfellow has beautifully described in his 
poem, " Evangeline." But although they were now 
made British subjects they remained loyal in their 




Sir William Johnson. 



BRADDOCK'S BLUNDER ' 83 

hearts to the French government, under whose aus- 
pices they had built up their httle homes and estab- 
hshed their very simple life in America. Almost 
all of them refused to take the oath of allegiance as 
British subjects when war came on again in the 
middle of the century. Their presence in Acadia 
was regarded by the English and the colonists as a 
danger, for the reason that they were always ready 
to take up arms if necessary against the English. 
A decree was therefore issued in 1755, that they 
should be removed from Acadia and scattered 
through the various English colonies where they 
could do no harm. 

There were about six thousand of these simple, 
ignorant peasant people and they were forcibly com- 
pelled to go on board English vessels and to be 
sent away from the homes that they had laboriously 
created in the American wilderness. 



CHAPTER VIII 



COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY 



IN order to understand the difficulty that FrankHn 
found in inducing a union of the colonies it is 
necessary to remember the circumstances of their 
history. At the time of Franklin's effort — the 
middle of the eighteenth century — the prominent 
men of the several colonies were in tolerably free 
communication with each other. It is true that 
there were no trustworthy mails, no telegraphs, no 
cheap postage, and no newspapers of more than 
local circulation. But in spite of these facts the 
colonists north and south had by this time more 
or less of communication with each other. Coast- 
ing vessels did much to acquaint the people of 
each colony with what was going on in the others, 
and the personal traveler was always expected to 
carry a budget of letters whithersoever he went. 

The growth of the colonies had in fact brought 
them much nearer together than they had ever been 
before. Moreover, as their dangers thickened and 
84 



COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY 



85 



their difficulties increased, the leading men in each 
colony more and more felt the necessity of con- 
sulting those of the other colonies. 

But it had not been so from the first. Each colony 
had been established independently of all the rest 
and for a long time each had remained practically 
without communica- 
tion with its neigh- 
bors. Travel had 
been difficult, dis- 
tances long, and 
communication very 
infrequent. 

Another thing that 
for a long time ten- 
ded to prevent any- 
thing like common 
action among the 
colonies was the fact 
that their conditions 
varied widely. Out of this circumstance grew the 
fact that each developed institutions for itself, adapted 
to its own conditions and in many ways totally un- 
like those which had been developed out of the con- 
ditions and circumstances of its neighbor colonies. 
In New England the farms were small and a 




The postal service in 1700. 



86 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

large proportion of the people were engaged in fish- 
ing, or in commerce, or in the mechanic arts. In 
that region therefore the people lived mainly in 
villages, or near to them. There was much public 
work to be done in the way of making roads, buil- 
ding bridges, establishing schools, maintaining the 




Travelling on horseback. 

church, and in other ways, which was best done by 
local authority. 

It is a principle of sound political government 
that popular liberty exists in every country in the 
precise degree in which the functions of government 



COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY 87 

are minutely subdivided and distributed. The ideal 
of free government is that the individual shall de- 
termine for himself everything that pertains only to 
himself; that the local community — be it town or 
what not — shall decide for itself whatsoever pertains 
exclusively to its own interests and welfare, and that 
larger affairs affecting a larger area shall be governed 
and determined by some form of representative as- 
sembly acting for all the people of that larger area. 

This principle prevailed in the development of all 
the colonies, but varying conditions gave to it a dif- 
ferent application in one and another of them. In 
New England the system of town government nat- 
urally and perfectly answered the needs of the people 
— so perfectly indeed that Thomas Jefferson of 
Virginia fell in love with it and labored for years to 
introduce it into his own more southern colony. 

There, however, and in the colonies south of 
Virginia, conditions were such as to forbid this. 
The people of those colonies lived upon vast planta- 
tions far removed from each other and scarcely at 
all in villages or in the neighborhood of villages. 
Among them, both a larger and a smaller unit were 
necessary. The smaller unit, as the scholarly Mr. 
Bruce has pointed out, was the plantation, which 
was compelled to exist in practical independence of 



88 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

all other plantations and of all other relations. It 
must provide for itself It must have its own com- 
missariat in order that the people, white and black, 
living upon it should be fed, and clothed, and 
housed. It must be governed by its master in- 
dependently of all other agencies of government. 

The larger civil unit in the south was the county. 
Tt was the function of the county court, acting not 
only judicially and legislatively, but administratively 
also, to provide for the maintenance of roads, the 
building of bridges, and all those other interests that 
belong to the community. 

In another important respect this difference made 
itself manifest. In New England, where the popula- 
tion was concentrated in and around villages, it was 
possible for the town to maintain schools, either 
public or private, as the case might be, for the educa- 
tion of all the children. In Virginia and the colo- 
nies south of that region this was difficult, for the 
simple reason that the population was too widely 
scattered. In very few places were there enough 
children within the radius of possible school atten- 
dance to form even a small school. The result of 
this condition was that the great planters who wished 
to educate their children were compelled to employ 
tutors and governesses of their own. Often a num- 



COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY 



89 



ber of planters would combine their resources in 
this respect. One of them would employ the tutor, 
or the governess or both, and the rest would send 
their sons and daughters to him — not to " board " 




In a Virginia home. 

with him, for the southern planter intensely resented 
the idea of receiving pay from any of his friends for 
food and lodging — but to " live " with him, and at- 
tend the school. The only expense which they 
were permitted to share was that of employing the 
governess, or the tutor, or both. All the rest was 



90 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CI£NTURY 

hospitality, pure and simple. Of common schools 
for all the people there were practically none. 

These differences of social and political life were 
fundamental. They were the outgrowths of con- 
ditions and circumstances and they were in many ways 
irreconcilable. Accordingly it was felt among the 
people of the various colonies that there was not a 
sufficient community of habit to justify a community 
of interest and activity. Each colony was very nat- 
urally jealous of its own institutions — institutions 
which it had built up to meet its own needs. In 
each colony there was a feeling that anything like a 
general government, authorized to control all of 
them, might endanger the integrity of their several 
systems. The Federal idea had not yet taken hold 
of men's minds and they had not yet become recon- 
ciled to it, simply because of their desire in each case 
to go on managing their own affairs in the way which 
they had found to be good. 

It is not at all to be wondered at, therefore, that 
the colonies rejected Franklin's plan, wise as it was, 
and refused to set up a general government whose 
authority might encroach upon their liberty of in- 
dividual action. This jealousy continued in greater 
or less degree, not only through the Revolution but 
for several years after it was finished. Even at the 



COLONIAL INDIVIDUALITY 91 

time of greatest peril to all the colonies in conflict 
with England, it prevented the formation of a gen- 
eral government capable of levying taxes, raising 
money or effectively doing anything for the common 
defence. It was not until some years after indepen- 
dence was secured that consent was given to the 
creation of a general government of adequate power. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE FRENCH POWER IN 
AMERICA 

A GOOD deal of the trouble encountered in 
the management of the colonial wars was due 

to the inability of the English government to 
understand the conditions that prevailed in America. 
For lack of such understanding the English gov- 
ernment brought to bear upon American problems 
no practical intelligence whatever. It seems to 
have been the thought of the English statesmen of 
that time that almost anybody who had a title was 
competent to rule in the colonies and to conduct 
military operations there. 

The French on the contrary were steadily " put- 
ting their best foot foremost." They sent out their 
greatest soldier, the Marquis de Montcalm, to take 
charge of their interests in America. About the 
same time, in 1756, the English government sent 
out a most incapable person called the Earl of Lou- 
doun, making him Commander-in-chief of the Eng- 

92 




DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 93 

lish and colonial armies in America, and at the same 
time Governor of Virginia. 

Behind this appointment was the conviction that 
the colonies ought to act together under a single 
government, and that conviction, as _ 

we have seen, was a wise one in its ^^"^ ^^>^ 
way. But in order to secure such 
acting together on the part of the 
colonies it was absolutely necessarv 
that the colonists themselves should 
bring it about or at least consent to 'l *' 

-TTT. 1 I'll General Montcalm. 

It. Without consultmg them, how- 
ever, Lord Loudoun was appointed Governor of 
Virginia, with authority to establish a military rule 
in America which should control all the colonies. 

Lord Loudoun blundered from the beginning. He 
saw the desirability of reconquering Louisburg which 
had, as we know, been conquered by the colonists 
before and foolishly given back by the English gov- 
ernment to the French as a club with which to break 
the back of the English power in America. 

But his method of attempting this conquest gave 
to the great French soldier, Montcalm, the oppor- 
tunity he wanted. Lord Loudoun, in order to as- 
sail Louisburg, stripped New York and the other 
northern colonies of the troops who were sorely 



94 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

needed to protect the border against French inva- 
sion. In June, 1757, Loudoun's force set sail for 
Louisburg, leaving the border ahiiost helpless. He 
accomplished nothing. He went as far as Halifax 
and, after paltering for a time, turned back and sailed 
for New York. 

In the meanwhile Montcalm was quick to seize 
upon the opportunity given to him. When the 
troops that should have defended the 
northern border were withdrawn the 
French commander at once marched 
with his French forces and his Indian 
allies to seize upon Fort William 
Henry at the southern end of Lake 
Lord Loudoun. George, seventy miles north of Al- 
bany. He took the fort, and his Indian allies butch- 
ered the garrison. 

Fortunately a change of government in England 
came about this time. A wise man named William 
Pitt, afterwards the Earl of Chatham, took the place 
of the dunces who had preceded him in control of 
British foreign affairs. His first act, so far as the 
colonies were concerned, was to remove the incom- 
petent Lord Loudoun. His next was to make a 
sensible arrangement with the colonies, with regard 
to the expenses of the war. He proposed that the 




DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 95 

colonists should furnish the troops necessary to carry 
it to a successful conclusion, and provide clothing 
and pay for their own soldiers, but not for any 
British troops that might be sent out to help them. 
In return for this, he, first of all English authori- 
ties, settled once for all the vexed question of rank 
between English and American officers. Previous 
to that time it had always been arrogantly held 
that any English regular officer, 
whatever his grade might be, 
should outrank in command a 
colonial officer even though that 
officer might hold a superior (^^"^ 
rank. Pitt arranged that the '',v«a,j. • " -^'^Sa^^ 
American officers should stand 
on a level with those sent out ^■^'^ 

• \ y rt • ^ 1 r William Pitt. 

with the British regulars, man tor 
man. This was an enormous concession to colonial 
pride and, in response, the colonies gladly voted to 
the English service all the troops that might be 
asked for. 

Under these conditions of justice and common 
sense, three expeditions were hopefully set on foot. 
One of them was to assail Louisburg ; one was to 
proceed to Fort Duquesne ; and the third was to as- 
sail the fortresses at Ticonderoga and Crown Point. 




96 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



These three expeditions constituted the chief features 
of the proposed campaign, but they were not quite 
all of it. Other and minor operations were under- 
taken in aid of them. 

The operation against Louis- 
burg was made by sea and land 
and lasted for nearly two months, 
under the entirely capable com- 
mand of General Amherst. At 
the end of that time, on July 27th, 
1758, Louisburg was conquered. 

A little more than a month 
later, General Bradstreet made a 
conquest of Fort Frontenac, which 
commanded Lake Ontario, and 
destroyed the entire French fleet 
on that lake. The result of these 
operations was to cut off Fort 
Duquesne, where Pittsburg now 
stands, from all its sources of sup- 
ply, to render it helpless, and in 

Uniform of 43d Regi- ^ ^ 

ment of Foot, raised in the end to Compel its abandon- 
America(i74o). n\^nt. Thus, at last, intelligence 

instead of stupidity had taken control of the 
war. 

General Forbes, a thoroughly capable commander. 




DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 97 

and a man of great resolution, had been placed in 
charge of the expedition against Fort Duquesne. 
He was a regularly trained British officer, but he 
had none of the arrogance of Braddock. Unlike 
that commander he consulted Washington as to 
methods of warfare in the woods and accepted his 
advice. He went further even than this. As he 
approached the French fortress, he threw Washing- 
ton with his Virginians to the front, and trusted 
the great colonial commander to make the assault 
in an effective way. Forbes himself was mortally 
ill and was carried during the march on a litter. 
He ought to have gone to a hospital but, with a 
resolute mind, he determined to remain with his 
column until its work should be done. He was 
wise enough to make the young colonial officer, 
George Washington, second only to himself in com- 
mand. And when he himself fell ill he trusted 
practically everything to the sagacity of this young 
man, born in Virginia, and bred in the woods. He 
had sense enough to see that Washington was fitter 
to command than any other officer he had with him, 
and, on grounds of fitness alone, he left the direction 
of affairs largely to him — mere boy that he was. 

On the 26th of November, 1758, Washington, in 
command of the expedition, reached Fort Duquesne 

G 



9S LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

only to find that the French had abandoned it and 
burned all of its buildings on the day before. Wash- 
ington was thus at last permitted to take possession 
of that position which he had for so long a time in- 
sisted was the key to the Ohio country. Forbes 
gave him authority to build there a strong and per- 
manently defensible English fortress, to which he 
gave the name of Fort Pitt, at the same time naming 
the spot itself Pittsburg — both in honor of the only 
English minister who had intelligently directed colo- 
nial affairs. 

By this time Washington, young as he was, had 
begun to be a man of superior mark in Virginia and 
even in the colonies other than Virginia which were 
engaged in this loosely organized struggle. He was 
not only recognized as the ablest m,ilitary comman- 
der in the colonies, and one capable even of instruct- 
ing British officers in the arts of American cam- 
paigning, but he had begun to be recognized also 
as a man of supreme common sense whose counsels 
were needed in the conduct of the social and political 
affairs of the colony. 

During this expedition against Fort Duquesne, 
George Washington was nominated for a seat in 
that House of Burgesses which gave law to Virginia 
and directed all public affairs of that colony. So 



DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 99 

great was his popularity that in his absence he was 
elected by an overwhelming majority over three 
competitors. 

When the struggle for Fort Duquesne was over 
and its conquest had been made a permanent fact 
of the military situation by his engineering skill in 
fortifying there, he returned to his home at Mount 
Vernon to enjoy a little honeymoon with his newly 
wedded wife. 

He had in the meantime resigned his military 
commission and determined to lead thenceforward 
that planter life which he always preferred to any 
other, and from which he was 'drawn throughout al- 
most all his life solely by a sense of obligation to 
render public service. 

He had hardly settled himself at Mount Vernon, 
however, before he was summoned to take his place 
in the House of Burgesses at Williamsburg and do 
his part there as a Virginian chosen by his fellow- 
citizens for a service of peace. 

Then occurred one of the most picturesque and 
gratifying incidents of this great man's life. He 
was only twenty-six years of age and was wholly 
unknown in the political life of his native state. 
The House of Burgesses included among its mem- 
bers the most distinguished statesmen that Virginia 



100 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

could boast even in that golden time. Many of 
them were old enough to be Washington's father or 
grandfather and wise enough to be his mentor. Yet 
in anticipation of his coming this House of Bur- 
gesses, composed of Virginia's most distinguished 
men, had by unanimous vote instructed its speaker 
to welcome him in the most conspicuous and honor- 
able way that could be devised. 

Ignorant of the honors planned for him, young 



3 


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fe^^ 


^^^s 


[ -^•^:i;Trt 


V- M ' ■ 'r--" .-K i^-'^i^iji'^ 


H 


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mm. - '■ f 


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A Virginia mansion, Westover. 

Washington modestly entered the hall of the House 
of Burgesses and took his seat. As he did so, the 
speaker of the house arose and, in a speech glowing 
with eloquence, presented to him the thanks of the 
House, and the colony that it represented, for his 
brilliant and untiring military service. That speaker 



DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 101 

was possessed of the eloquence which has been 
characteristic of so many Virginians throughout their 
history and he pronounced a eulogy upon this young 
man which fairly stunned and staggered him. 

At the end of it young Washington arose and 
made almost the only failure of his life in an at- 
tempt to reply. He was so overcome that he almost 
lost the power of utterance. He stammered so 
helplessly that one who was present on that occasion 
has left it upon record that the young man " could 
not give distinct utterance to a single syllable." 
This brave and brilliant youth, who had never 




IScUiW MU^U. 



shrunk from danger, had never shirked his duty, 
had never quailed before a foe, and had never failed 
^o acquit himself well in the presence of any condi- 
tion, fairly broke down. 



102 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



His breakdown was quite as honorable to him 
as any of his successes had been and the speaker of 
the house, uttering the thought and expressing the 
feeling of every man within its walls, came to his 
relief. He arose and interrupted Washington with 
the command: "Sit down, Mr. Washington ! Your 
modesty equals your valor and that surpasses the 
power of any language I possess." 

The expedition against Crown Point and Ticon- 
deroga was far less fortunate than 
that against Fort Duquesne, chiefly 
because of stupidity in its manage- 
ment. That expedition had been 
placed, nominally at least, under the 
^^ command of General Abercromby, 
who, by reason of his rank, had a 
Lord Howe. claim to superiority over his assis- 
tant, Lord Howe. But Lord Howe was a capable 
soldier, as Abercromby was not, and it was intended 
by Pitt that Lord Howe rather than General Aber- 
cromby, should direct operations as the actual leader 
and commander of the expedition. 

Unfortunately Lord Howe was killed in a skir- 
mish a little while before the attack upon Ticonderoga 
was made. Thereupon Abercromby became, in fact 
as well as in name, the commander of the expedition 




DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 103 

with full license to blunder to the utmost extent of 
his ignorance of military affairs. He attacked the 
fort in front — that is to say, on its very strongest 
side — where there was no hope of accomplishing 
anything against it except by the use of artillery, 
which he had not. He ordered that the fort 
should be taken by a charge of bayonets. The men 
made the effort very gallantly but with no possibil- 
ity of success. They were beaten back and pres- 
ently retreated in 
panic. But this 
disaster at Ticon- 
deroga was destined 
to have no import- 
ant influence upon ^"'^'"^ °^ ^'^'^ Ticonderoga. 

the completion of the work of war. The French 
power in America was already crumbling to its 
fall. 

The capture of Fort Frontenac and Fort Du- 
quesne had practically severed all communication 
between the French in Canada and their friends in 
Louisiana, near the mouth of the Mississippi. It 
had given to the English secure possession of the 
Ohio valley and of all the region west of the Alle- 
gheny mountains. It had destroyed the very bases 
of the French fur trade and worse still, so far as the 




104 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

French were concerned, it had convinced the In- 
dians, who had hitherto been loyal to the French, 
that the power of their allies was nearing its end. 
After that the Indians quickly cast off their alle- 
giance to the French. 

Further still, the final fall of Louisburg — the 
great French fortress which had so long stood in 
the way — opened a water route by which a British 
fleet might approach Quebec itself. It opened the 
way to the crowning campaign of the war. Under 
the orders of Pitt — who might have 
been a great soldier if his genius had 
not been devoted more exclusively to 
great statesmanship — General Amherst, 
now Commander-in-chief of all the 
British forces in America, advanced 
into Canada by way of Lake George 
and Lake Champlain, conquering the Forts at Ti- 
conderoga and Crown Point on his way. This was 
in 1759, and during the same year, almost at the 
same time, a brilliant young officer, General James 
Wolfe, who had distinguished himself at Louisburg, 
was directed to lead an expedition up the St. Law- 
rence against Quebec, the last of the great French 
strongholds in America. 

Quebec lay upon a great plain, at the top of a 





DESTRUCTION OF FRENCH POWER 105 

high and well nigh inaccessible bluff. The place 
was heavily fortified and defended by French regu- 
lars under Montcalm, a great general. After a 
month or so of futile endeavor Wolfe at last found 
a path by which he scaled the bluff 
and placed his army in rear of the 
city and the forts, shutting them off 
from supplies. Montcalm was 
forced to come out and give battle '(J^^ 
on the open field, where Wolfe de- ^jm~^ 
feated him in a fierce battle in which I^F^sa. 

both he and Montcalm were killed. ^'^"^''^^ ^^'°'f^- 
Quebec was taken and all of Canada was surrendered 
finally to the British. When peace was at last con- 
cluded between England and France in 1763, the 
French gave up to the British all of their American 
possessions east of the Mississippi River, except a 
little district around New Orleans. 

Except for the hostility of the Indians, therefore, 
the English colonies on the Atlantic coast were now 
free to push their settlements westward into the 
great fertile region that lies between the Alleghen- 
ies and the Mississippi. A new empire of vast 
extent and boundless resources was thrown open to 
the men who had already, in effect, created a great 
English-speaking nation in America. 



106 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 




Old view of Quebec. 



CHAPTER X 

SOME COLONIAL GRIEVANCES 

WHEN the great French and Indian war 
ended, in 1763, there had been EngHsh col- 
onies in America for more than a hundred 
and fifty years. The English settlements had not 
only taken root but had grown vigorously. A 
large proportion of the people in the colonies were 
by that time native Americans. They knew no 
other country as their own but this. In a sentimen- 
tal way they were still loyal to the mother land and 
to its king, but they had never been in England 
and they had by this time accepted new ideas of 
their own. New impulses of liberty had been born 
in them. Living in conditions totally different from 
those that existed in England they had built up for 
themselves systems of government which were in- 
deed founded upon the broad principles of English 
liberty, but which differed in radical ways from the 
system of government that prevailed in the mother 
country. 

107 



108 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



Still more markedly they had developed new so- 
cial systems of their own. In the South a certain 
conservatism of mind had preserved the old English 
traditions in a verv great degree, though these were 
modified considerably by the differing conditions of 
colonial life. But this very preservation of the in- 
herited ideas of a century and a half before made the 
lives of the colonists radically different from the lives 
of Englishmen in England. A hundred and fifty 
years is a very long period, and during that time 
vast changes had occurred in England, many of 
which were not reflected in the life of the colonists. 

In Pennsylvania 
the Quaker influ- 
ence and the great 
influx of Germans 
and Scotch- 
Irishmen which 
had taken place 
during that time, 
had brought about 
a system of living 
altogether different from that which then prevailed in 
England. In New York the influence of Dutch ideas 
had not yet expended itself, and life there still bore 
distinct marks of the Dutch origin of that colony. 




old Dutch house. 



SOME COLONIAL GRIEVANCES 109 

In New England peculiar conditions had tended 
from the first to lead the people into new ways of 
living and thinking, quite other than those which 
the original colonists had brought with them from 
England. 

When we add to these things the fact that the re- 
lations between the colonies and the mother country 
had involved much of friction, and, in the view of 
the colonists, much of injustice and even of oppres- 
sion at times, it is not at all wonderful that after the 
middle of the eighteenth century, the spirit of dis- 
content and antagonism which had long existed, be- 
came acute among the Englishmen in America. 

HUN awayy on the ^d 

Cay of May Jaft, a ycaog 
Negro Boy, named Joe, xhu 
Country boroi formerly be 
lorgcd to Capr. Hugh Hut. 
Whocrcr brirgi ihc laid Soy 
the Sabfcribcr at Edifla, or to 
ihc Work Hcafc in Ctarlej ^ouv, ihall 
have 5 / reward. On thcconrrar)' who- 
ever harbouri the faid Boy, may defend 
upon being fcvercly prorccurcd, by 

Thomas CHJbam. 

Notice of runaway slave. " Charleston Gazette," 1754. 

For one thing England had forced upon the un- 
willing colonists the acceptance of African slavery. 




no LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

There were many people in the colonies, who, for 
reasons of personal convenience and benefit, desired 
a large importation of African slaves. But there 
were a much larger number who dreaded an increase of 
slave population lest it result in black insurrections, 
and the better people of the southern colonies ob- 
jected to the system on moral and humane and other 

TO BE SOLD by William 

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meni, fr any WamnWuB good ^rttp- 
hg f4(idki find Fumittfre^ choice Barbados 
avd Bo-f? en jR«m, alfa Corcthl JVaUrt 
and Limfjs4}ce, as vjeJI at a p4fcel cf extretf- 
diaary h((i4» trading Gtsdi, and maty tf o* 
iht? forn ftsrtabk far lb* ^^eafen. 

Illustrated advertisement from the "Charleston Gazette," 1744. 

ethical grounds. Virginia, South Carolina and 
other colonies sought to prevent the influx of negro 
slaves by many laws of their own. Some of these 
laws absolutely prohibited the further importation 
of negro slaves. Some of them placed upon such 



SOME COLONIAL GRIEVANCES 111 

importation a head tax so heavy as to discourage 
the traffic and make an end of it. In one way or 
another those colonies into which this tide of negro 
slave immigration was coming made every effort in 
their power to dam it up and stop it. They feared 
it. They were well-nigh appalled by the dangers 
that it threatened. It was felt to be an evil in the 
present and a terrible menace for the future. But 
every law that any colony made against this nefarious 
traffic was vetoed by the authority of the English 
government. This was done because the traffic in 
slaves from the west coast of Africa was an enor- 
mously ■ profitable one to those who were engaged 
in it, and because not only the courtiers and the 
statesmen of England but the king himself, had 
money invested in it. 

But for this British interference the number of 
negro slaves in this country would have remained so 
small that their ultimate emancipation would have 
been a problem easy to solve, and the people of this 
nation would have been spared all the evils and dis- 
turbances which the presence of a great slave popu- 
lation ultimately brought upon the country, including 
a terrible civil war. 

The unjust trade laws, as we have seen in an 
earlier chapter, very seriously impaired the prosperity 



112 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of the colonists. The original Navigation Act, while 
somewhat encouraging New England shipbuilding 
and commerce, had vainly sought to compel the colo- 
nists to trade only with England and her outlying pos- 
sessions. In 1733 another law, known in history as 
the. Sugar and Molasses Act, was enacted. The pur- 
pose of it was to compel the colonists, under heavy 
penalty, to import all their sugar, molasses and rum, 
from the British West Indies. Under this law a 
heavy import duty was imposed upon such goods 
when brought into the colonies from any country 
except Great Britain itself or the British West Indies. 
If this law had been enforced it would have de- 
livered a staggering blow to the commerce and pros- 
perity of the colonies especially of New England, 
for by that time the bold Yankee sailor boys had 
built up an extremely profitable trade with those 
West India islands which belonged to the French 
and Spanish. None of these laws could be en- 
forced, however. Public sentiment in the colonies 
justified shipmasters and merchants in evading them, 
and they did so in a hundred ingenious ways. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE ATTEMPT TO ENFORCE OBNOXIOUS LAWS: JAMES 
OTIS'S INSPIRING MAXIM. 

IN 1760, George III came to the throne in Eng- 
land. He was an obstinate person of dull mind, 
and of an overweening sense of his own impor- 
tance and his own authority. His rule was alto- 
gether arbitrary and reactionary. 

In 1 76 1, William Pitt, the elder, whose wise di- 
rection of affairs had brought the English arms to 
victory in America, in Europe, and on the seas, was 
forced out of office, and a new and very illiberal 
policy was adopted by the English government in 
its relations with America. Among other things, 
George III and his minister Grenville, decided to 
enforce in the rigidest possible way, the trade laws 
which for half a century and more the colonists had 
been evading and defying with impunity. 

In order to evade these laws merchants and ship- 
masters were accustomed to bribe the customs 
officers and thus induce them to wink at evasions. 
H 113 



114 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Ships would land at a dock, unload the greater 
part of their cargoes and, only after doing so, re- 
port their arrival to the customs officers. These 
officers in collusion with the shipmasters would 
then go on board and assess duties only upon 
such small part of the cargo as remained in the 
ship's hold. The rest of the goods had been landed 






^ 



D'V* a.Law of the Colony of 
■ Neiv-Tork, THIS Bill shall 

pafs current -^fLp ToVi F I f^ E 
POUNDS. |y| ■ New.York, 
the Second Day of April, One 
Thoufand Seven Hundred and fifty 



:2^^^ 



[lOO/." 





i 



t^5"'Tis Death TO counierJeit this BILL. 



New York colonial currency. 



without paying any duty at all. This of course was 
an illegal practice and an immoral one. But even 
the most religious people of that time sanctioned it 
as an act of just and rightful resistance to an unjust 
and oppressive law, enacted by foreign authority. 



OBNOXIOUS LAWS 115 

Under George III it was decided to follow up the 
goods thus illegally landed, to find, and to confis- 
cate them as smuggled merchandise even after they 
had been sold ashore. To that end a British com- 
missioner of customs was sent out to Boston who 
appealed to the courts of Massachusetts for what 
were called " Writs of Assistance," These were in 
effect general search warrants, good for an indefinite 
period, not returnable into any court, which author- 
ized the customs of^cer to search all houses and 
warehouses at will for dutiable goods supposed to 
be concealed therein. They were in effect blanket 
search warrants, violative of a fundamental principle 
of the liberty of the citizen, and capable of enormous 
abuse in the hands of an officer disposed to mis- 
chief. 

When, the merchants of Boston appealed to the 
courts contending that these Writs of Assistance were 
illegal in form and oppressive in effect and that 
they should not be issued, it became the official duty 
of James Otis, at that time Advocate General for 
the colony, to argue the case in favor of the king 
and the commissioner. But James Otis was a pa- 
triot in full sympathy with the colonial antagonism 
to this injustice and to the oppression of the trade 
laws themselves. Rather than appear as Advocate 



116 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

General in behalf of the issue of these writs James 
Otis resigned his very lucrative and honorable office 
and took the other side. He went into the court 
and spoke with extraordinary eloquence for more 
than five hours, arguing against the writs, and for 
the first time putting forth the war cry of the Revo- 
lution that " Taxation without Representation is 
1 yranny. 

These trade laws against which the colonists were 
in revolt were enacted by the British 
Parliament in which the colonies and 
their people had no representation 
whatsoever. It was a part of the fun- 
damental principle of English liberty 
that taxation could be legally imposed 
only by a parliament representing the 
people who were to be taxed. As the 
Americans were not represented in the British Par- 
liament they promptly accepted Otis's dictum as ap- 
plicable to their case not only with reference to the 
Trade Laws but with reference also to every other 
law which might be made by the Parliament of Eng- 
land to impose a tax upon the people of this country. 
They had always been ready and willing, through 
their representative bodies, to tax themselves as freely 
as might be necessary for any public purpose, but 




OTIS'S MAXIM 117 

they felt keenly that any attempt to tax them under 
a law made by a parliament in which they had no 
representative was in the nature of an unjust oppres- 
sion. They realized also that this effort of the new 
king was in fact an attempt to reduce them to abject 
and helpless subjection to a government which was 
foreign to themselves. It would not have done for 
them to contend openly for the right to smuggle 
goods. But in Otis's splendid phrase that " taxation 
without representation is tyranny " they had a win- 
ning war cry, and from that hour forth they made 
the most of it. 

It must be borne in mind that England was 
not a free, self-governing land at that time in the 
sense in which we understand those terms in our 
day. There was no such thing as " government of 
the people, by the people, for the people," even in 
England. There was a parliament, to be sure, and 
theoretically, the House of Commons, representing 
the people, was supreme in all affairs of government 
by virtue of its control of all revenues and expendi- 
tures. 

But the House of Commons did not represent 
the people. In the first place large numbers of 
the people were not permitted to vote at all. In 
the second place, repregentatign wa§ grossly and 



118 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



even grotesquely unequal. The populations of the 
greatest manufacturing and trading cities of the land 
were represented scarcely at all — or absolutely not 
at all, while each of the great aristocratic universities 
was permitted to elect members of Parliament. 

Worse still there were " rotten boroughs " and 
" pocket boroughs " all over England, each author- 
ized to elect legislators without any reference what- 
ever to its population. 

A " rotten borough " was one in which there was 
_f^., no longer any pop- 



ulation, or one in 
which the popula- 
tion had dwindled 
to a mere handful. 
Some of the rotten 
boroughs had in 
fact sunk into the 
sea and no longer 
existed even terri- 

Massachusetts three-penny bill. toriallv. Yet for 

each of them some lord of the manor was entitled 
by law to elect a member of the House of Commons, 
while the people of the great manufacturing and 
commercial cities were left unrepresented or inade- 




quately represented. 



OTIS'S MAXIM 119 

The " pocket boroughs " were those in which 
only a few people resided, the few people being the 
tenants and dependents of some great landlord. 
The landlord could determine for himself what 
tools of his own should be sent to Parliament from 
the pocket boroughs he controlled, and his de- 
pendents, voting without secrecy or a ballot, of 
course elected his candidates. 

There were still other ways in which the British 
government at that time was not representative of 
the British people ; but the facts cited are sufficient 
for illustration. 

All these anomalies of unequal representation 
grew out of the dominant idea of that time, and 
were logical enough as corollaries from it. That 
dominant idea was, not that all the people should 
equally participate in government, but that for the 
sake of all alike the best and safest classes should 
rule. The great families that owned the land and 
represented property, the universities, representing 
education and the church, and the aristocrats, who 
controlled rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs, 
who represented England's ruling class, were 
thought to be safer custodians of political power 
than the great, penniless and often ignorant masses 
could be. And so as the masses might at any time 



120 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

outnumber the more safely selected classes, voting 
and representation in Parliament were carefully so 
restricted as to give the ruling class secure control no 
matter what the majority of the people might desire. 

The same principle prevailed in America under 
varying conditions. In most of the colonies there 
were severe restrictions upon voting and office hold- 
ing, as we know. In the Puritan colonies in particu- 
lar, church membership was a requisite. In nearly all 
the colonies a belief in Christianity was imperatively 
demanded as a qualification for the suffrage. In 
many there were property qualifications also insisted 
upon. This endured indeed in some of the states 
until the middle of the nineteenth century. In 
Virginia, until 1850 every man who owned land in 
more than one county was entitled to vote in every 
county in which he had a holding. So jealously 
was this idea guarded that the voting at each elec- 
tion was continued for three days in order that 
every landowner might ride from one county seat 
to another and cast all his votes. 

In brief, the principle of class representation 
rather than representation by mere numbers was 
very generally accepted in the eighteenth century as 
a necessary safeguard against anarchy and misrule. 

But th^ Americans had another and a deeper 



OTIS'S MAXIM 



121 






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122 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

grievance. The millions of Englishmen in America 
were not represented at all in that English Parlia- 
ment which made laws for their governance, and as- 
sumed to tax them, to regulate their commerce, to 
restrict their manufactures and in every other way 
subject them to a government which they regarded 
as completely foreign and in many ways as inimical 
to themselves. 

Neither Massachusetts, which had become in 
effect a great state, nor Virginia, which had also be- 
come a powerful commonwealth, nor Pennsylvania, 
nor New York, nor Carolina, nor any other of the 
great, populous, and powerful American colonies 
was permitted to send a single representative to 
Parliament. Not any of them — not all of them put 
together had in the British Parliament even so much 
as the voice of a rotten borough or a pocket borough. 

Is it any wonder that the Americans, while still 
remaining true to their traditional allegiance to the 
mother country, went into revolt against so unjust 
a government as this? Is it anv wonder that they 
refused to pay the taxes levied upon them by a 
foreign power ? Would they not have proved 
themselves unworthy of their claim to be English- 
men if they had tamely submitted to such oppres- 
sion as this ? 



OTIS'S MAXIM 123 

The courts issued the Writs of Assistance simply 
because the law required them to do so, but the 
paper mandates did not accomplish their purpose. 
At the door of every house, which the writs au- 
thorized the customs officers to search, there stood 
a resolute man with a gun in his hand, defending 
his home as his " castle." And the customs of- 
ficers, caring far less for the British revenue than 
for the safety of their own persons, did not under- 
take to force their way past those alert and very 
belligerent human barriers — the armed Yankees. 

The Writs of Assistance had been sought by the 
king and his ministers not chiefly as a means of 
collecting revenue but mainly as a method of 
forcing upon the colonies and their people the 
acceptance of the theory that they were subject, 
absolutely and unquestioningly, to every decree 
that the British king might issue and every act 
that the British Parliament might adopt. 

Against this assertion of arbitrary authority the 
colonists protested with vigorous insistence from 
the beginning. They held themselves to be Eng- 
lishmen entitled to all those rights which English- 
men had claimed and enjoyed ever since the barons 
at Runnymede, more than five centuries before, 
namely, on the 15th day of June, 1215, had com- 



124 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

pelled King John to grant the great charter of 
EngHshmen's rights and hberties — that Magna 
Charta which was by decree of the will of the 
English people to endure for all time. 

The rights of the colonists were both threatened 
and invaded by the policy of the new king in Eng- 
land. Their resistance to the invasion was instant, 
universal and determined. Their resentment of 
the threat was as quick as is the response of gun- 
powder to the spark that ignites it. 

There were other arrows, however in the quiver 
of the reactionary British ministers of that time and 
they essayed to use them against the Americans. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT 

THE colonists were still sentimentally loyal to 
their home government and to their king while 
practically they were almost continually in 
revolt against the wrongs done them by that govern- 
ment and that king. They had not yet begun to 
think of independence or to realize the fact that they 
had built up here thirteen colonies with more than 
two and a half millions of people in them, who had 
no need of any government from without them- 
selves. They still clung to the old traditions of 
king and country. They still regarded themselves 
as colonists, though in fact they had built up pros- 
perous states abundantly capable of governing and 
caring for themselves. Such assistance as they had 
received from the mother country in the French 
and Indian wars was more than offset by the jaunty 
indifference with which the mother country, at a 
critical time and for its own advantage, had given 
up to their enemies all that they had won in behalf 

125 



126 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of their own defence, by their prowess, their heroism, 
and their endurance. 

They had at last reached that stage in their his- 
tory in which any attempt of a government, foreign 
to themselves, to interfere with their interests or to 
determine their affairs was met with quick resent- 
ment. Loyalty to king and country was well 
enough in a sentimental way, but the spirit of the 
colonists — most of whom had been born and bred 
in this country and had never dwelt in England — 
was one of independence and self-assertion. Loy- 
alty to the king in England was 
regarded as the duty of every man, 
but at the same time every man 
felt that the king was under a re- 
ciprocal obligation to behave him- 
self, that he must keep his hands 

A Vngini I sliilliiic; re i • i rr • 't-'i 

orr colonial aiiairs. 1 he senti- 
ment of self-government had grown by what it had 
fed upon until it was now the dominant sentiment 
in every colony north and south. 

In a general way the interests of the colonies 
were not at all identical. New England, New York 
and Pennsylvania were largely engaged in commerce. 
The southern colonies were almost wholly engaged 
in agriculture. Between these two parts of the 





BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT 127 

country there was little In common except that 
Pennsylvania also had developed large agricultural 
interests, and it seems possible, as we review the 
history of that time, that if the 
English government had been 
wise in its generation the colo- 
nies north and south might never 
have become united in their in- 
terests and in their determination 
to resist English oppression. Virginia shilling 
The grievances in New England (reverse). 

were no grievances at all in the Carolinas and in 
Virginia, until a stupid blunder on the part of the 
British minister made them such. 

This blunder began with the determination of the 
British minister to send ten thousand soldiers to 
America. These troops were to be quartered upon 
the people after the first year of their service In this 
country, and to be paid and supported out of 
money raised by taxes levied upon the colonies, this 
under authority of the British Parliament In which 
the colonies were not represented. The pretence 
upon which these soldiers were to be sent out was 
that of defending the colonies against their enemies. 
But the colonies had no enemies at that time. The 
French power had been completely broken and the 



128 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Spanish in the tar south were no longer belligerent 
or in any way dangerous. There remained only the 
Indians, with whom the colonists felt themselves 
entirely competent to deal. There was absolutely 
no defensive need for the sending out of these ten 
thousand British regulars and the colonists were not 
deceived by the pretence. They understood from 
the beginning that these soldiers were sent out to 
overawe the colonists themselves, and to hold them 
in subjection — to enforce taxes and laws made by a 
parliament in which they had no voice or vote. 

By way of compelling the colonists to pay for the 
support of these troops who were sent out to op- 
press them, the English Parliament enacted a stamp 
act. That act required that all notes, deeds, con- 
veyances, bills of sale, and a-11 other legal documents 
of every kind should be written upon stamped paper 
on which a tax had been paid. It decreed that any 
note, bill of sale, conveyance, or other legal docu- 
ment not written upon such stamped paper should 
be void and of no effect. It decreed also that all 
newspapers printed in the colonies should be printed 
upon stamped paper, each sheet thus paying a tax 
to Great Britain. 

The American people have twice demonstrated 
the fact that they have no rooted objection to the 



BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT 129 

payment of stamp taxes for the purpose of raising 
revenue, when such taxes are levied by a Congress 
consisting of their own representatives. Twice, in 
order to meet war expenses, they have wilhngly paid 
stamp taxes, not only upon deeds, conveyances and 
legal documents but upon express receipts, receipts 
for money, telegraph messages and everything else 
of the kind. There is this radical difference, how- 
ever, between the two cases. When their own Con- 
gress, representing themselves and acting in their 
name and by their authority has determined upon 
a system of stamp taxation by way of meeting the 
needed expenses of the government, the American 
people have raised no protest and made no com- 
plaint whatever. They have felt that they were 
merely paying their own ex- 
penses; but in that earlier time 
when a foreign government seek- 
ing to oppress them sent out a 
standing army to accomplish this 
purpose and undertook to make 

them pay for the maintenance Rosa Americana penny. 

of that army by stamp taxes, levied under a law 
which was enacted by a parliament in which they 
had absolutely no representation whatsoever, they 
went immediately into revolt. 
J 




130 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Some historians have pointed out that a year 
before the Stamp Act was passed, the British min- 
ister, Grenville, invited the colonists to suggest any 
other means of raising the money which might be 
more agreeable to themselves. But their objection 
was not to the particular form of the tax but to the 
tax itself. They saw no good reason why they 
should be taxed by any method 
for the purpose of keeping troops 
in America to oppress and over- 
awe themselves. 

It was the Stamp Act that 
quickly brought the North and 

Rosa Americana penny Soutll into a COmpaCt for reSO- 

(reverse). j^^^^ union in resistance to British 

aggression. The injustice of that act was felt in all 
parts of the country and it was instantly resented 
everywhere. 

Reduced to its lowest terms the situation was 
this : The British government required the Ameri- 
can people to pay and support an army of ten thou- 
sand men sent out to this country, as they firmly 
believed, solely for the purpose of keeping the peo- 
ple of this country in subjection to British authority 
and of enforcing navigation and other laws which 
were obnoxious to them. This the American peo- 




BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT 131 

pie, North and South, and in all the middle colonies 
as well, resolutely refused to do. The soldiers might 
come, of course, but the colonists absolutely and 
unanimously refused to contribute one cent for their 
support as an overawing force in America. 

Even the proposal of this Stamp Act in Parlia- 
ment, before it had been enacted, created a very 
great excitement all over America. The Americans 
sent protests and humble petitions to the king in 
which they called his attention to the fact that they 
were Englishmen possessed of all the traditional 
rights of Englishmen and with respectful intimations 
that they were disposed to insist upon those rights. 

No heed was paid to these protests, however. 
The English administration of that time had made 
up its mind to enforce this measure and it proceeded 
without regard to the sentiment or the sense of the 
American people. In March, 1765, the Stamp Act 
became a law. 

It was doubly offensive to the Americans. It 
not only provided for the collection of what they 
held to be an unjust tax for what they regarded as 
an unjust and oppressive purpose, but it went fur- 
ther and enacted that Americans who should violate 
the terms of the law might be tried in a court with- 
out a jury if the prosecuting officer so desired. 



132 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Here was a direct and exceedingly offensive viola- 
tion of the rights of Englishmen secured under 
English traditions. Here, too, was a new ground 
for American resistance to British authority, a new 
occasion for revolt, a new basis of revolution. 

Throughout the land James Otis's cry went up 
that " Taxation without representation is tyranny " 
and throughout the land the determination to resist 
and defeat this Stamp Act was universal and reso- 
lute. Here and there the act was resisted violently 
by mobs of angry citizens. A mob in New York 
burned the royal governor's coach and tore down 
the theater which was regarded as the pleasure house 
of the wealthy who sympathized with British pre- 
tensions. 

In Boston the resistance took even more violent 
forms. There the people assailed the revenue offi- 
cers themselves and obliged them to take refuge on 
board the war vessels in the harbor. At Charles- 
ton in South Carolina the stamped paper sent out 
for use was stored in Fort Johnson. The people 
promptly assailed Fort Johnson, captured it, took 
the stamped paper, packed it into bundles and sent 
it back to England. 

By reason of this resistance not one single stamp 
and not one single sheet of stamped paper was sold 



BEGINNINGS OF REVOLT 133 

in all America except in the case of a few ship clear- 
ances at Savannah. Not one deed or document 
was written upon such paper. And no court in all 
the country from that time forward consented to 
treat any document as void by reason of its lack of 
the British stamp. 

In effect, of course, this was revolution and war, 
but the time had not yet come when Revolution 
and War should put on their uniforms, shoulder 
their guns, and take the field. By sheer force of 
obstinate resistance the Americans had beaten the 
British government in its most carefully planned 
schemes for reducing them to subjection, and all 
the expenses of that army of ten thousand men sent 
out to overawe the colonists and to enforce obnox- 
ious laws, were paid for by the taxpayers in England 
and not by the Americans. 



CHAPTER XIII 

COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 

BY this time a good deal of wealth had been 
accumulated in the colonies. A part of this 
wealth had been brought out from England 
but by far the greater part of it had been created in 
the colonies themselves. In the more southern of 
them and in Pennsylvania the fields had been richly 
fruitful from the first and their products had made 
of their possessors rich men, or men at least well- 
to-do according to the standards of that time. 
In the southern colonies this wealth was mainly 
represented by the ownership of vast plantations 
each independent of all the rest and each providing 
for itself as if it had been a sovereign domain. 

In the middle colonies and in New England the 
conditions were very difi^erent. In Pennsylvania 
and in New Jersey the fields were fruitful, while in 
New England, where the majority were still farmers 
in spite of the sterility of the soil, the fisheries and 
commerce yielded a great return to those enterpris- 
134 



COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 135 







Nelson mansion. 



136 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

ing men who lived in that part of the country. But 
in New England agriculture was only meagerly prof- 
itable, and, as we have seen, the people of that 
region lived more and more in towns and villages, 
drawing their revenues from the sea by means of 
the fisheries and also by means of that great com- 
merce which they had built up with ships that sailed 
to all parts of the earth. 

In the South there were almost no cities of con- 
sequence. The principal southern city was Charles- 
ton and that was scarcely greater in population than 
any one of hundreds of villages is in our time. 
It was a seat of social distinction of course. Those 
planters who were able to indulge themselves were 
apt to have town houses in Charleston, where they 
sumptuously entertained their friends and where a 
very graceful and gracious social life prevailed. But 
their energies were chiefly expended in the conduct 
of their plantations and the great plantation houses 
were, after all, the chief centers of social inter- 
course. 

There were no large cities in the South simply 
because there was no need of large cities. A little 
city like Charleston furnished room enough for 
the merchants of that time to act as factors for the 
planters, receiving their products, shipping them to 



COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 137 

various markets and in return furnishing the planters 
with whatsoever they needed for the support of both 



i '^-^ & Mr 










L-r. 



1 **^ 




'/s'/Mik .1^ 



Interior of Rosewell Manor. 



138 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the blacks and the whites upon their plantations. 
For the rest the plantation house was a great center 
of hospitality and enjoyment. 

In the North the conditions were so far different 
that there was even thus early a strong tendency to 
the concentration of population in cities and towns. 
Salem in Massachusetts was a prosperous, although 
not a large city. Boston, New York and Phila- 
delphia, by reason of their commerce, rapidly grew 
into consequence as commercial cities. Other 
towns, like Gloucester, grew rich upon the fishing 
and whaling industries. Baltimore — in the middle 
region — became an important port and a seat of 
elaborate social life. 

Philadelphia soon became the leading city in the 
union, so far as population was concerned. Boston 
became the leading city in commerce and in wealth, 
with New York as a close rival. 

There was some manufacturing in all the colonies, 
but Massachusetts and her dependencies quickly 
outrivaled all the rest in this department of industry. 
The waterfalls there furnished power that cost noth- 
ing, except a trifle in its adaptation to use by the 
construction of water wheels, dams and sluiceways. 
There were sawmills in Massachusetts and in some 
of the other colonies long before the first sawmill 



COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 139 

was set up in England. These cheapened the cost 
of lumber and with it the cost of building. 

It must be borne in mind that trees of very 
large size grew in unlimited abundance in all the 
colonies and that they stood distinctly in the way 




Water mill. 



of the development of agriculture. To get rid of 
them was the first problem and this was often 
solved simply by cutting them down, chopping 
them up into logs, rolling the logs together and 
burning them. But the shrewd intelligence of the 
colonists, after the introduction of saw-mills, led to a 



140 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

better use for the timber that must be destroyed in 
in order to open fields. The saw-mills were kept 
busy converting into boards and planks and tim- 
bers the trees that must otherwise have been de- 
stroyed by fire in order to make way for the corn, 
and wheat, and everything else that fields in Amer- 
ica might produce. 

The water power was also turned to other manu- 
facturing uses, for in spite of all Brit- 
ish laws to the contrary, the colonists 
were quick to appreciate their oppor- 
tunities and alert in making for them- 
selves all things of use that they could 
make more cheaply than they could 
import them. They set up tanner- 

Costumeof. ^ , . ,.,. 

Thomas Hancock, ^^s for the convcrsion of skms mto 
Black velvet coat, leather. They manufactured cloths 

waistcoatand ^ ii'i i ii ii 

breeches (about of such kmds as they could and they 
1755)- even established paper mills to meet 

the needs of the printing presses which had been 
set up in different parts of the country. In brief, 
the colonists were little by little making themselves j 
industrially independent of Great Britain long before 
the thought of political independence entered their 
minds. 

The colonists were learning more and more rapidly 




COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 141 



the lesson of living within themselves and upon their 
own resources. They were growing more and more 
by natural processes into an independent nationality 
of thought and feeling which could only mean, in 
the end, independent nationality in fact. 

But with the rapid increase of wealth and the col- 
lection of men and women into cities, which for their 
time were deemed large, but which 
would be scarcely more than vil- 
lages in our time, there naturally 
developed a tendency to fashion 
and luxury. Balls and routs and 
dances were given, at which colonial 
dames arrayed themselves as gor- 
geously as the fashionable women 

of London might have done. Costume of Thomas 
„,, Boylston. White 

1 heaters were opened and even ^^^■,,, ^.aistcoat, gold 
the art instincts of the people were trimming (about 
gratmed by importations or paint- 
ings and statuary from the Old World. 

It was a period of fine dressing both in England and 
in this country, and the affectation of finery was seen 
among men who had the means with which to in- 
dulge it quite as much as it appeared among women. 
Men of that time, who were able to afford it, dressed 
in rich garments, faced with white satin and trimmed 




142 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

with lace or gold embroidery. Men with smaller, 
but sufficient means, dressed less expensively but 
still in the same fashions. Blue cloths, velvet coats, 
satin vests, brass buttons, cocked hats and lace frilled 
shirt-fronts and wrist-bands were the ordinary dress 
of the well-to-do even in a country whose people 
had been engaged for three or four generations in 
conquering a wilderness and whose religious teach- 
ings had been those of asceticism. 

The dress of the wealthier colonial dames at that 
time was not only as rich as that 
of their English cousins, but was 
in fact identical with it. There 
/^'3:^'^;j^_r^ were no fashion plates, to be sure, 
^ to teach the colonists how their 
clothes should be designed, for the 

From portrait of , , 

Mrs. Simon Stoddard ^^ason that cheap picture-makmg 
(about 1725). was not then known. But every 

year the colonial modistes — particularly those of 
Boston — imported London dolls, completely dressed 
in the latest fashions, and the well-to-do women of 
the colonial cities flocked to see and study these il- 
lustrations of the fashion, in many cases paying for 
the privilege. 

The plainer people everywhere still dressed sim- 
ply and mainly in homespun. The men wore 





COLONIAL WEALTH AND LUXURY 143 

leather breeches still, finding them cheaper and more 
serviceable than cloth, even of domestic manufacture. 
And luxury did not stop at costly dressing. In 
some of the wealthier families, both north and south, 
there were solid gold tea services, 
with much solid silver and costly 
china dinner tableware. Fine linen — 
at that time very costly — abounded. 
But extravagance in dress was some- 
what mitigated by the fact that fine 
clothes could be and were worn by Quaker bonnet. 
one generation after another till they were worn out. 
In all wills of that time we find bequests o^ costly 
garments occupying a prominent place. 

This chapter is written in order to give a glimpse 
of the conditions of life and the attitude of mind 
which prevailed among the colonists at the time 
when they began to feel themselves slowly approach- 
ing a great and difficult struggle for their liberties. 
They were brave men and true and mightily strong, 
but they did not lack the vanities which are com- 
monly regarded as fit only for courtiers. 

A simpler conception of life and manners came 
later after the discipline of war and the hardships of 
a struggle for independence had taught the Ameri- 
cans a new code of conduct. 



144 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 




u 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 

SO far as material interests were concerned there 
was little in common between the northern, the 
middle and the southern colonies. New Eng- 
land was engaged largely in commerce, fishing, whal- 
ing and in some degree in manufacturing, with only 
a limited attention to farming for profit. The mid- 
dle colonies, especially Pennsylvania, had some in- 
terest in commerce but a much larger one in agri- 
culture. The South was almost exclusively agri- 
cultural. If they had been let alone these various 
colonies would have had no sufficient interest in 
common to bind them together into anything that 
might even threaten a united resistance to British 
authority. But they were not let alone. 

The British authorities nagged all of them, and 
the nagging resulted in drawing them together in a 
common spirit of resistance to oppression. 

Two years before the Stamp Act was passed an 
event occurred in Virginia which stirred the populace 
J 145 



146 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of that colony as deeply as all the colonies were 
stirred a little later by the injustice of the Stamp 
Act. In Virginia the English church was established 
by law and its parsons were paid by taxes levied 
upon the people, whether the people attended that 
church or some other. 

For a long time, as we know, tobacco had been 
the customary currency of Virginia in lieu of money. 
But by this time actual money had in some degree 
found its way into the colony and was in more or 
less use there. It had been customary, before that 
time, to reckon the value of tobacco at twopence a 
pound and at that rate the parsons' salaries had been 
paid in that commodity. In 1758 there had been 
a very short crop of tobacco and its price in the 
market was enormously enhanced for several years 
afterward by this scarcity. The people therefore 
demanded the privilege of paying the parsons in 
money instead of tobacco, reckoning each twopence 
as the equivalent of one pound of the tobacco which 
they had before paid. This the parsons resisted as 
in effect a measure of repudiation. They demanded 
their full measure of tobacco notwithstanding its 
enormously enhanced price. In view of these cir- 
cumstances the House of Burgesses had passed an 
act, in 1758, by which the people were authorized 



ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 147 

to pay the salaries of their clergy in money at the 
traditional rate of twopence for each pound of to- 
bacco due them. 

At this point the British government interfered. 
On petition of the parsons the king vetoed the act, 
leaving the clergy free to demand their pay in tobacco 
of full weight notwithstanding the scarcity and the 




Rolling tobacco to the wharves. 

high price of that commodity. The Virginians felt 
themselves offended and affronted by British inter- 
ference, precisely as Massachusetts had been in 
other cases. The Virginians, like the men of 
Massachusetts, resented and resisted the interference. 

Notwithstanding the king's veto, the House of 
Burgesses insisted upon it that the parsons should 
take their pay in money at the traditional price of 
tobacco and should not be privileged to demand the 
actual tobacco in a time of scarcity. 

One of the parsons brought suit to recover, in 
lieu of his money salary, sixteen thousand pounds 



148 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



of tobacco, which was worth many times more than 
the salary had ever before amounted to. 

The people of his parish employed in their behalf 
a young lawyer named Patrick Henry, who had not 
as yet come into prominence but 
who was presently destined to 
become one of the great figures 
of the rapidly approaching revo- 
lution. This "Parsons' Cause," 
as it was called, gave him his 
opportunity. In a burst of elo- 
quence such as had never before 
been heard in Virginia he argued 
Tatiick Henry. his causc upon high interna- 

tional grounds, and upon high grounds of natural 
and inherent human right. He contended that the 
king's interference with the right of the colonists to 
regulate their own affairs in their own way was a 
gross usurpation of power and an infringement of 
the rights of the colonists as Englishmen. He 
said in the course of his argument that " A king, by 
disallowing acts of a salutary nature, from being the 
father of his people degenerates into a tyrant and 
forfeits all rights to his subjects' obedience." This 
was a daring utterance, but it met with popular ap- 
proval and applause. 




ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 



149 



The law was clearly with the parsons and ob- 
viously the court was bound to rule in their favor. 
But so greatly had Henry's eloquence impressed 
both the judge and the jurors that the verdict ren- 
dered, while it recognized the legal right of the 
clergymen, awarded them only one penny as dam- 
ages for the violation of that right. 

This was the tocsin of Revolution in Virginia. 
Here was an open assertion 
of the superiority of colo- 
nial right over kingly rule. 
Here, as clearly as in James 
Otis's war-cry, that " Taxa- 
tion without representation 
is tyranny," the sentiment 
of the American people was 

expressed in phrases Suffici- Advertisement from the 

ently plain, and sufficiently "^ew York Weekly Gazette 
, . . and Post-Boy" (1765). 

clear as to their meaning, 

to give them popular currency, and to inflame the 

popular mind. 

This victory for colonial rights was in itself im- 
portant as a part of the events which constituted the 
progress of that time ; but it was even more impor- 
tant in another way. It directed attention to Patrick 
Henry and brought him upon the stage of public af- 




150 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

fairs, where his eloquence, his abounding common 
sense and his extraordinary courage were destined to 
make him presently one of the most influential hu- 
man forces that were at that time acting together to 
bring on the American Revolution with all its las- 
ting consequences of human liberty. 

No one can study the history of that time with- 
out seeing clearly that the victory in the " Parsons' 
Cause " was in itself a matter of utter insignificance 
as compared with the great work for liberty which 
it gave Patrick Henry opportunity, a little later, to 
do. 

In view ofthe position he had won in the Par- 
sons' Cause, Patrick Henry was presently elected 
to the House of Burgesses. At the time of his elec- 
tion it was clearly understood that the people chose 
him for their representative in full conviction that 
he, better than any other, would express their grow- 
ing sentiment of hostility to British aggression. He 
met this expectation fully and completely. 

At that time the Stamp Act was the chief subject 
of American antagonism and Henry assumed that 
in one way or another a discussion of it would be 
precipitated in the House of Burgesses. In this 
he was disappointed. Nobody brought the matter 
to the front, and so Henry, young man and new 



ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 



151 



member that he was, decided to do this pubHc duty 
himself. He arose in his place one day and offered 
a set of six resolutions which he asked the House 
of Burgesses to adopt. 

These resolutions were couched in the boldest, 
simplest, and most effective language. They asserted 
without equivocation the right of the people of Vir- 
ginia to govern themselves. They asserted that no 
power on earth could lawfully levy a tax upon the 
people of Virginia without their own 
consent. In brief, these resolutions 
constituted a sort of Declaration of 
Independence. Their meaning was 
the same as that which Jefferson at 
another time expressed when he 
said that the Parliament of Great 

Ti • • 1 1 • 1 . , 1 Costume of Peter 

Britain had no more right to make „ •, ^r i . . 

& i aneuil. Velvet coat, 

laws for the government of Virginia cloth waistcoat, velvet 

, ITT r rt • luffles (about 1740). 

than the House or Burgesses in 
Virginia had to make laws for the government of 
England. They declared that the General As- 
sembly of the Colony alone had " the right and 
power to lay taxes and imposts upon the inhabi- 
tants ! " 

The introduction of these resolutions by this 
young man, newly elected to the House and only 




152 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



twenty-nine years of age, shocked and startled the 
conservatives of that body into a half frightened 
opposition. If the matter had been put to a vote 
without debate the probability seems to be that 
Henry's resolutions would have been voted down 
as something like flat treason. But Henry, having 
Introduced his resolutions, made a speech in behalf 
of them, which, Thomas Jefferson declared, sur- 
passed anything he had 
ever heard in the way 
of eloquence. It was 
in the course of this 
speech that Henry 
openly-gave warning of 
danger to the British 
king, pronouncing the 
famous words " Ca?sar 
had his Brutus, Charles 
the First his Cromwell, 
and George the Third " 

Windsor chair. Facsimile of a cut . 

in the "New York Weekly Gazette at that pOint the prc- 

and Postboy," 1765. siding officer inter- 

rupted the orator with the cry of " treason ! " and 
that cry was echoed by many others in the House. 
It did not daunt the bold young orator and patriot. 
He waited until the tumult subsided and then fin- 




ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 153 

ished his sentence with the words " may profit by 
their example," adding, " if this be treason make the 
most of it." 

At last the American sentiment had found a lea- 
der bold enough and able enough to give expression 
to it in words that breathed and burned. Here at 
last was a man who was brave enough to tell the 
truth even to a king. Here at last was a man in 
Virginia as daring and as capable as James Otis and 
Samuel Adams were in Massachusetts — a man who 
knew the hidden thought of the 
people around him and who dared 
speak it out loud. In spite of the 
instinctive and conservative opposi- 
tion which the introduction of the 
resolutions had stirred up, Henry's 

1 r • n J ^L T T From portrait of 

speech so tar mnuenced the House ,, . ^, 

r Mrs. Anna Gee, 

of Burgesses that five of his resolu- (about 1745). 
tions, which had been denounced as treasonable, 
were adopted, although one of them was carried by 
the slender majority of a single vote. 

" And the people said Amen." When the reso- 
lutions — all six of them — were published, the popu- 
lar response was quick, excited, angry. Those reso- 
lutions fully expressed the popular thought and 
reflected the popular determination. From that 




154 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

hour resistance to the stamp tax was open, deter- 
mined, inflexible. The enforcement of that law in 
Virginia became at once as hopelessly impossible as 
it had become in Massachusetts ; and the other col- 
onies were accustomed at that time to follow the 
lead of the two dominant ones. 

We must bear in mind that when Patrick Henry 
thus, by his eloquence, inflamed the public mind of 
Virginia and the other colonies against the funda- 
mental principle of English aggression, and in be- 
half of the doctrine that the colonies had an abso- 
lute right to govern themselves, these thoughts 
were new to most men, all over the world. 

All this occurred as early as 1765 — full eleven 
years before the Declaration of 
Independence was written. These 
events were educative. One after 
another of them — the speech of 
James Otis in Boston, the speeches 
of Patrick Henry in Virginia, and a 
little later the eloquence of Samuel 
Adams in Massachusetts, not only 
reflected public sentiment, but 
guided, aroused and stimulated it. Little by little 
these men and these events were educating the pub- 
lic mind in America to the thought of resistance and 




Samuel Adams. 



ADVENT OF PATRICK HENRY 155 

to that other thought of still greater consequence 
— the thought of independence. 

These men, and such as they, were the creators 
of the American Revolution — the founders of the 
republic we so greauy love and honor. 



CHAPTER XV 

THE ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 

ONE excellent result followed from the Stamp 
Act. Its enactment did more than anything 

else had done to draw the colonies together 
and to induce them to organize for a united resistance 
to British oppression. The feeling was growing in 
the colonies that however diverse their interests 
and their industries might be, they had in this 
matter a common cause. And it was beginning 
now to be felt among them that if that cause was 
to be won they must in some form act together for 
its accomplishment. 

Accordingly a Congress was called to consider 
means of resistance to the Stamp Act and to all 
other such legislation. That Congress met in New 
York on the 7th of October, 1765. Nine of the colo- 
nies sent delegates to it and all of them were in strong 
sympathy with its purposes. Among the delegates 
were many of the most eminent men in America. 
By this time public sentiment had been so far 

156 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 157 

aroused in behalf of the American right of self- 
government that the Congress adopted a Declara- 
tion of Rights and Grievances, which was almost as 
emphatic as if Patrick Henry or James Otis had 
written it. It distinctly declared that the right to 
tax the American people existed nowhere on earth 
except in legislative bodies elected by the American 
people and commissioned by them to determine 
what taxes should be paid. This was a direct chal- 
lenge to the British king and Parliament and it was 
meant to be such. 

The Congress added another challenge. British 
laws and decrees concerning Stamp Act enforcements 
prescribed that offenders of certain classes in Amer- 
ica should be tried in courts that had no juries — 
courts representing only the king and the British 
government. This Congress distinctly asserted the 
right of every Englishman in America, when ac- 
cused of crime, to be tried by a jury of his neigh- 
bors in accordance with the traditions of English 
liberty which had existed since the days of Magna 
Charta. 

There was still among the Americans, however, a 
strong sentiment of loyalty to the king and to the 
mother country. These people were demanding 
their rights, not as Americans, but as Englishmen in 



]5S LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

America, the rights that all Englishmen in England 
enjoyed. They were not seeking separation from 
the mother country, nor were they asking anything 




An old New York mansion. Van Rensselaer manor house at Green- 
bush, N. Y. 

which would not have belonged to them had they 
remained in England. Accordingly they added to 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 159 

these bold challenges a very humble expression of 
loyalty and affection for the king and expressed both 
the desire and the purpose to remain his obedient 
subjects. These prayers and petitions and protes- 
tations of loyalty were unheeded by the king and 
Parliament. They fell upon deaf ears and dumb 
intelligences, though perhaps they had some influ- 
ence in inducing the repeal of the Stamp Act. 

But it was the utter failure of British officers of 
every kind to enforce the Stamp Act in any degree 
that led to the repeal of that act in 1766, There 
was attached to the repealing act a clause declaring 
"that Parliament has power to legislate for the colo- 
nists in all cases whatsoever." 

This was a challenge in return. It was a direct 
and flatfooted contradiction of the fundamental con- 
tention of the colonists. It claimed for the British 
Parliament precisely that right and power which the 
colonists denied and against which they were in re- 
volt. But when one's adversary surrenders, the 
victor is apt rather to laugh at than to resent the 
mutterings of the vanquished ; and so the colonists, 
having defeated the Stamp Act and all its purposes, 
paid little attention to this paper declaration of the 
right of the British Parliament to legislate for them 
at will. That claim of right to enact legislation for 



160 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the colonies was never for a moment abandoned by 
the king or ParHament. 

Behind that declaration of the British Parliament 
there was a fixed purpose to reduce the colonists to 
subjection in one way or another. 

The Stamp Act had been an internal impost, and, 
in resisting it, its character as such had been strongly 
emphasized, both by the colonial objectors and by 
William Pitt and their other friends in England. 
The special contention had been that the English 
Parliament had no right to levy any internal tax in 
the colonies. By implication, at least, the colonists 
and their friends recognized the right of Parliament 
to levy external taxes — import duties and the like. 

By way of asserting this right Parliament, during 
the next year, passed a series of acts, known as the 
Townshend Acts, from the name of the minister who 
framed them. These acts levied no internal taxes 
whatever. But they imposed import duties upon 
tea, paint, lead and paper brought into the 
colonies from any country. In order to collect 
these duties a board of officers was sent over to 
Boston to supervise the traffic. 

The colonists resisted these imposts precisely as 
they had resisted the Stamp Act, and with no less 
of determination. They simply would not pay the 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 161 

duties thus levied by a Parliament which in their 
view had no right to tax them at all. The Board 
of Customs at Boston had no means of executing 
the laws by physical force, while the colonial im- 
porters were amply strong enough to defy them in 
the absence of such physical force. 

Accordingly the British government sent out two 
regiments of soldiers to help the customs officers 
and to overawe the importers. The people of Bos- 
ton were required to receive these soldiers into their 
houses, feed and lodge them without pay, and thus 
to bear the expense of their own oppression. 

Very naturally the people of Boston — high spirited 
and already excited as they were — resented this ac- 
tion and regarded it as a threat, and the people of 
the other colonies heartily joined with them in acts 
of resistance. 

Massachusetts and Virginia formally protested 
against the oppression, and agreements were made 
throughout the colonies not to import articles on 
which the English government thus assumed the 
right to levy taxes. Soon all the Townshend acts 
were repealed, except that a small duty on tea was 
still retained. The duty thus retained was so small, 
indeed, that in itself it was not worthy of considera- 
tion or worth resisting. But its retention was, and 

K 



162 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

was meant to be, a renewed assertion of the right of 
the home government to tax the colonies without 
their consent. It was on principle that the colonists 
resisted, resented, and refused to pay this insignificant 
tax. The struggle over this matter lasted for three 
years with continual friction and with frequent con- 
flict between the troops and the people. Riot after 
riot occurred. The people became more and more 
violent as time went on until, at last, on the 5th of 
March, 1770, a mob assailed some of the troops 
with such determination that the soldiers, acting in 
self-defense, as they claimed, fired upon the populace, 
killing and wounding some of them. 

This was the first direct act of war against the 
colonists by armed forces and it drove the people 
into a frenzy of angry excitement. The event is 
known in history as " The Boston Massacre." Im- 
mediately the people of Boston were called together 
in a town meeting numbering three thousand able- 
bodied men, all of them angry, all of them de- 
termined, and all of them ready to risk everything 
for their rights. Regardless of consequences they as- 
serted their will that all the British soldiers should 
be removed from Boston at once. They were de- 
termined that no troops should longer be quartered 
in the city, whether upon the people or at the ex- 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 163 

pense of the British government. T his was mihtary 
rule and they would have none of it. 

The town meeting appointed Samuel Adams to 
present their demand to the Royal Governor and his 
counsel, and there to insist upon it in the name of 
the people and by virtue of their authority. 

Adams was a relentless patriot. He neither of- 
fered nor suggested compromises of any kind or 
apologies or promises. In the name of the people 
of Boston and of Massachusetts, he simply de- 
ynanded that every British soldier in Boston should 
be removed from the city and that at once. When 
the Governor and Council hesitated and seemed 
disposed to dicker for terms, Samuel Adams, with 
that eloquence which always flowed from his lips 
when he had the cause of the people to plead, an- 
swered, " There are three thousand men in yonder 
town meeting ; the country is rising ; the night is 
falling, and we must have our answer." 

This was a challenge which admitted of no argu- 
ment, no discussion, no delay. It meant in efi'ect, 
" Mr. Governor, you can order the removal of your 
troops now, or you can leave it to the three thousand 
men in that town meeting to expel them by force." 
That is not what Samuel Adams said in words, but 
it is what his eloquent sentences meant, and the 



164 IJFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



-■■•^'^^iJ; 









l- 



■ ■ a- A V 




Loionial fiagiuents : Door trim from 55 Broadway, N. Y. ; George 
Washington's chair; clock at 57 Broadwr.y. 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 165 

Governor clearly understood the fact. Accordingly 
the order was instantly issued that all the troops 
should be removed at once from Boston and sent to 
an island in the harbor. 

All these events were but details in a struggle 
whose scope was too broad and too vital to be af- 
fected by the settlement of any one or any half 
dozen incidents. Between the British assertion of 
a right to govern and control the colonists, to make 
laws for them, and to tax them at will, and the op- 
posing assertion on the part of the colonists of their 
own exclusive right to govern themselves, to tax 
themselves and to make all laws that affected them- 
selves, there was a " great gulf fixed." An " irre- 
pressible conflict " had arisen in America and that 
conflict if not settled by the submission of one or 
the other party to it must clearly end in war. 

All this was very evident to the wiser of the 
statesmen of England — to such men as Edmund 
Burke and the Earl of Chatham, to Fox and to 
Walpole, and to all of their liberal kind. But un- 
fortunately for England and for its king, such men 
as these were no longer dominant in the English 
government. Lord North became premier in 1770. 
He was a cultivated man, a witty one, and a per- 
son of exceedingly good manners ; but he was weak 



166 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

in the extreme and so subservient to the king that 
Horace Walpole characterized him as the " osten- 
sible " minister, meaning that the king in fact ex- 
ercised all the authority of the premier. 

That king was George III, a man obstinate, con- 
ceited, brutal, and incipiently insane. He was deaf 
to all contentions except those that pleased himself. 
His attitude as a ruler was that his will was law and 
must be obeyed, always and everywhere. He had 
made up his mind that the Americans should be gov- 
erned by his decrees and he had sufficient influence 
over Parliament to secure the aid of that body in his 
attempt to carry out this programme of oppression. 

Accordingly, although the authority of Parliament 
had been successfully defeated by the Americans in 
their resistance to the Stamp Act, again in their resis- 
tance to the quartering of troops in Boston, and inci- 
dentally in their resistance to the Townshend Acts, 
George III devised other ways of nagging the Ameri- 
cans. It was a peculiarly stupid thing to do. To a 
man of larger intelligence than he possessed it would 
have been obvious that the Americans were on the 
verge of a revolt and were strong enough, by reason of 
their numbers, of their geographical remoteness, and 
of their resources to make that revolt a dangerous one 
to the British power. To a mind less dull and ob- 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 167 

stinate than his it would have been clear that the 
time had come for a policy of careful conciliation. 
But to George III none of these considerations ap- 
pealed in the least. His attitude of mind was sim- 
ply that his will was law by the Grace of God, and 
that it must be enforced with all the power that 
Great Britain could bring to bear. 

In their resistance to the Trade Laws the colonists 
were still carrying on trade without paying the duties 
which the English Parliament had decreed that they 
should pay. In other words, Yankee ships were 
smuggling goods into the colonies as freely as they 
could under the circumstances, and with so little of 
disguise as not to arouse the smallest moral senti- 
ment against the practice. The people held that 
the Navigation and Trade Laws v/ere unjust and that 
they proceeded from an authority which had no right 
whatever to enact them. They therefore gave all 
the moral sanction that public opinion could give to 
the evasion of those laws by shipmasters and even 
to their open violation and defiance. 

On the other hand, George III was determined to 
enforce such laws whether the people of the colo- 
nies liked them or not. A British warship, called 
the Gaspee, was sent out to Narragansett Bay, which 
at that time was the favorite route for the smuggling 



168 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

vessels. Her officers were ordered to seize all such 
vessels, and their cargoes, and to proceed against 
them for purposes of condemnation. For a time 
the Yankee sailor boys were content to outsail the 
Gaspee, slip by her, and land their cargoes unmo- 
lested. This they were generally able to do by 
reason of their superior seamanship, the superior 
speed of their New England built vessels, and their 
superior knowledge of the bays and inlets that Liced 
the country around Narragansett Bay. 

Nevertheless the Gaspee succeeded in making 
some prizes. In every such case public sentiment 
in America felt that a grievous wrong had been done 
to an innocent shipmaster. For by this time every 
patriot in America held that the laws which these 
shipmasters were evading, or violating, were no laws 
at all, but were enactments of a power that had no 
right to enact them. They were held to be uncon- 
stitutional and absolutely void. Therefore there 
was nowhere among the American patriots the 
smallest thought that the smuggling shipmasters 
were guilty of any offence against a valid law, while 
there was everywhere among the Americans a feel- 
ing that the enforcement of that law was an outrage 
and a wrong. 

Finally, in 1772, the British warship Gaspee lost 



ASSERTION OF AMERICAN RIGHTS 169 

her way one day and went aground. Thereupon a 
mob of reputable citizens of Providence, led by one 
of the most prominent merchants of that town, went 
out to her, seized her, set fire to her and burned 
her to the water's edge. When news of this reached 
England the government sent out a commission to 
inquire into the matter. This commission had au- 
thority to arrest all men accused of having been 
engaged in the affair and to send them out of the 
colony for trial in a court where there was no jury. 

Here was another and a flagrant invasion of those 
rights which the Americans claimed by virtue of 
their English citizenship. They were entitled to a 
trial by a jury of their neighbors. 

Fortunately the Chief Justice, Stephen Hopkins, 
although in a sense he officially represented the 
crown, took the view of the colonists and issued a 
decree that none of those men should be taken out 
of the colony for trial or be tried elsewhere than in 
a court where their case could be heard by "a jury 
of the vicinage." 

Thus one thing after another drove the Ameri- 
cans further and further toward thoughts of resis- 
tance and toward that thought of absolute inde- 
pendence which had been born in the minds of 
such men as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, James 



170 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

Otis and Thomas Jefferson, but which was not yet 
present in the minds of the people generally. They 
wanted to remain Englishmen in America. They 
were still loyal to the traditions of their race and to 
the mother country ; but they simply would not 
submit to injustice even at the hands of the mother 
country that they so loyally loved. 

Even to the minds of some of their great leaders 
the thought of independence was still exceedingly 
repulsive. As late as July 23, 1775, John Adams, 
writing to his wife, spoke apprehensively of the 
possibility that the colonies might be " driven to 
the disagreeable necessity of assuming a total in- 
dependency." 

However "disagreeable" that necessity might 
seem to conservative men like John Adams, every 
event of the time strongly tended to force it upon 
them and every such event tended to reconcile 
American thought to the prospect of separation 
from Great Britain. 



CHAPTER XVI 

DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 

AT this time, and indeed long after the Revolu- 
tion, Virginia and Massachusetts were rec- 
ognized throughout the country as leaders in 
every public movement. In March, 1773, the 
Virginia House of Burgesses, at the instigation of 
Patrick Henry, George Mason and Thomas Jeffer- 
son, took a step of far-reaching consequence. It 
was indeed the first decisive step towards a union of 
the colonies for defence against British aggression. 

The Virginia House of Burgesses appointed what 
was called a " Committee of Correspondence," 
whose duty it should be to maintain close and fre- 
quent communication with the authorities and the 
leading men in the other colonies and thus to secure 
concert of action between them with a view to 
united and determined resistance. 

Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New 
Hampshire and South Carolina, accepted Virgin- 
ia's suggestion gladly, and each of those colonies 

171 



172 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

promptly appointed a committee of correspondence, 
thus organizing resistance in a way that was cal- 
culated to make it formidable. The excitement of 
the public mind was by this time so intense that it 




A spinning bee. I 

only needed consultation and free correspondence 

between the leaders in the different prov'inces to 

crystallize it into something resembling revolution. 

The Townshend Acts had been repealed, indeed, 



I 



DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 173 

simply because it became obvious to the British au- 
thorities that they could not be enforced against the 
obstinate resistance ot the Americans. But, in 
repealing them, Parliament had made the same 
mistake that it had made in repealing the Stamp 
Act. It still insisted upon the right of the British 
Legislature, in which the Americans were not repre- 
sented, to tax the Americans at will. The Act 
of Repeal abrogated all the customs duties imposed 
by the Townshend Acts, except that it retained a 
small duty on tea. 

This duty was so small indeed as to be insignif- 
icant. It promised no revenue of consequence to 
the British government, and it involved no serious 
hardship to the colonists. That tax was retained 
for no other purpose than that of asserting the 
right of the British Parliament to tax the Americans. 
It was hoped in London that the utter insignificance 
of the tax would induce the Americans to submit to 
it and thus to surrender their contention. But the 
Americans had by this time planted themselves 
firmly upon a principle, a determination, a dogma. 
That principle, that determination, that dogma, was 
that the British Parliament had no right whatsoever 
to tax the Americans at all. As one of the great 
Americans of that time expressed it in an eloquent 



174 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



ff 



! 







Speech, "the right to take a penny impHes the 
right to take a pound." 

The Americans by this time were in a mood to 
dispute the right to take the penny as obstinately 

as they might have 
disputed the right 
to take the pound. 
They made up their 
minds that they 
would pay no duty 
whatever upon tea 
or anything else so 
long as that duty was 
not levied by acts of 
their own legisla- 
tures. They were 
ready to tax them- 
selves and to pay 
their taxes for any 
public purpose and 
to any extent that 
might be necessary. 
But they were determined to establish and maintain 
the principle that nobody else on earth could tax 
them or make laws of any other kind for their 
governance. In other words, the American people. 




i lI rlTl^fii^.^C^S* '™_iJ»^t* lift! 



DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 175 

almost without knowing It, had already declared 
their independence although, with the traditions 
strong upon them, they still shrank from any open 
act of separation from the mother country. 

Their resistance to this petty tea tax, which 
amounted to nothing in itself, was determined and 
and even violent. It took many forms. In every 
patriotic household it was decided that no more tea- 
drinking should be done until the drinking of tea 
should no longer imply submission to a tyranny. 
In many households there were family conclaves 
which solemnly affixed seals to all the tea caddies, 
with the determination that those seals should never 
be broken until such time as tea-drinking should no 
longer involve the payment of any tax to a foreign 
power. 

Many of these sealed tea caddies were preserved 
for a hundred years afterwards as precious me- 
mentoes of the patriotism of the men and women 
who had caused their sealing and from whom the 
owners of the farms and plantations concerned had 
been descended. 

But the tax was resisted in more violent ways 
than this. Every ship that bore tea into the har- 
bors of New York or Philadelphia was turned back 
and denied permission to land its cargo. In Charles- 



176 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



ton, South Carolina, the tea was allowed to be 
unloaded but not to be sold or otherwise disposed 
of. It w^as carefully placed in damp storehouses 
where it remained untouched for several years, after 
which, during the Revolutionary War, all of it that 
had not rotted, was seized and sold, and the 

money received for it 



was expended for ammu- 
nition with which to fight 
the British. 

In Boston an attempt 
was made to prevent the 
landing of tea cargoes, 
but the royal governor of 
Massachusetts, acting 
for the king, refused to 
allow the tea ships to 
quit the harbor and re- 
turn to England. He 
ordered that their car- 

A hatter's sliop in old times. i IJ U„ 1„., J^J 

' goes snouJQ be landea. 

The men of Massachusetts decreed otherwise. 
A company of them was formed and assembled, in 
the disguise of Indians, near the Old South Meet- 
ing House in Boston on December i6, 1773. 
Suddenly a preconcerted war whoop was raised and 




DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 177 

this company of Bostonians boarded the ships and 
emptied ninety thousand dollars' worth of tea into 
the salt waters of the bay. This event is known 
in history as the "Boston Tea Party." 

When news of these acts of resistance reached 
England the government and the majority party in 
Parliament grew very angry and passed several laws 
which the Americans called the "Intolerable Acts." 

One of these was the "Boston Port Bill." It 
was an act intended forever to destroy Boston as 
a commercial city. It ordered that no ships should 
enter the harbor of Boston or sail from that har- 
bor. Here was an act which it was not easy to 
resist, for the reason that a shipmaster violating 
such a law became, legally at least, a pirate, subject 
to all the pains and penalties of piracy in any part 
of the world to which he might sail. The act there- 
fore instantly destroyed the business of the Boston 
merchants, except in so far as they might do busi- 
ness through Salem, which city offered them the use 
of its ports, docks and warehouses. 

Another of the "Intolerable Acts" provided that 
in certain cases, persons accused of murder by 
reason of homicides committed in connection with 
the enforcement of the English laws, might be sent 
for trial either to England or to " some other of 

L 



178 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

his Majesty's colonies." The most careful of the 
modern historical investigators agree that this en- 
actment was designed, primarily at least, for the pro- 
tection of British officers who might commit hom- 
icide in the execution of their functions against local 
prejudice — that it was in the nature of a change of 
venue. Even if so interpreted it was held by the 
colonists to give a certain license of murder to their 
oppressors by excusing them from trial by a jury of 
the neighborhood, and removing the trial to so great 
a distance that the witnesses to the murder could 
not be heard upon the trial. On the other hand, 
it was held, if the homicide had been committed by 
a colonist in resistance to the enforcement of the 
law, this act deprived the offender of his right as an 
Englishman, to be tried by a jury of the vicinage. 

Still another of the " Intolerable Acts " was called 
the " Massachusetts Bill." That bill abrogated im- 
portant provisions of the charter of Massachusetts 
and in effect set up a military government in that 
colony with practically unlimited authority. 

Under this act the people of Massachusetts were 
left with no liberties at all. They were, so far as 
English law could determine, reduced to the condi- 
tion of a people subject to the will of an arbitrary 
military governor who might decree whatsoever he 



DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 179 

pleased as regarded them and whose decrees could 
be enforced by military power. The men of Massa- 
chusetts were not disposed to submit to any such 
rule as this and they never did submit to it as we 
shall see in the sequel. 

Still another of the " Intolerable Acts " was 
called the " Quebec Act." The province of Que- 
bec, which at that time included practically all of 
Canada, was governed by absolute autocratic author- 
ity. The Quebec Act prescribed that all the terri- 
tory south of that province from the Great Lakes to 
the Ohio River, including the western possessions 
of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and Vir- 
ginia, should be included in the province of Que- 
bec and governed by its arbitrary rulers. Massachu- 
setts, New York and Virginia by virtue of their 
early grants claimed vast territories in the west 
which this act was intended to take away from them. 
There were certain saving clauses in the act, and 
some historians in our time hold that these were 
meant to protect the grants to Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut and Pennsylvania. But the colonists do 
not appear to have understood the matter in that 
way. 

One good thing that the " Intolerable Acts " did 
was to cement the union between the several Ameri- 



ISO LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

can colonies and intensity their opposition to British 
tyranny. When Boston was practically closed as a 
seaport and its merchants were ruined, every colony 
was prompt to send help thither and, with the help, 
to send sympathy that meant far more than the 
material aid could mean. Even from South Caro- 
lina, half a thousand miles away, and from Georgia, 
still farther distant, there came gifts of money and 
help from those who did not know and could not 
know how soon the fate of Boston might fall upon 
their own ports of entry. 

These acts of oppression aroused the colonies 
from the far north to the far south to angry and in- 
dignant resistance. They served to unite the whole 
American people — with the exception of a small per- 
centage of Tories and toadies — in a spirit of deter- 
mined resistance. Everywhere the Americans were 
aroused to fury and presently by way of self-de- 
fence, and on motion of the Massachusetts Legisla- 
ture, they called a Congress to meet in Philadel- 
phia on the 5th of September, 1774. 

Twelve of the thirteen colonies sent delegates to 
this Congress and the 13th, Georgia, was in full 
sympathy with its purposes. 

This Congress adopted one extreme measure of 
resistance. That measure was suggested by the 



DRIFTING TOWARD REVOLUTION 181 

voluntary agreements which had been made by 
Americans in different parts of the country not to 
import any British goods so long as the British pre- 
tension of a right to levy taxes upon imports should 
be maintained. The Congress of 1774 enacted this 
into general law. It was forbidden throughout the 
English colonies in America to import British goods 
of any kind until such time as the British govern- 
ment should recognize America's rights. 

This enactment struck at the root of the whole 
difficulty. The British government had established 
and maintained these colonies as a source of revenue 
to itself and to its merchants and manufacturers. 
When the Americans decided that they would buy 
no more English goods, both the revenues of the 
British government and the profits of the British 
merchants and manufacturers were completely cut 
off. 

The time had now come when the Americans 
could adopt a policy of this kind for the reason that 
they had learned to make for themselves every arti- 
cle that they really needed. Their resources were 
amply sufficient for their own support. They could 
make cloths, which were inferior perhaps to those 
made in England, but which were sufficient unto 
their needs. They were smelting iron and they 



182 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

knew how to convert it into such utensils as they 
had need to use. They were growing hemp, and 
flax, and wool, and they knew how to weave and to 
spin them. They had glass works of their own. 
They had tanneries and they knew how to convert 
hides into leather, and leather into shoes and har- 
ness, without any aid whatsoever from the outside. 
They had ceased to drink tea, but they had sassafras 
in abundance and they were content with that. They 
had also in the south the yaupon and other shrubs 
closely akin to tea. If worse came to worst they 
could do without tea altogether. 

In brief, the American people had begun to real- 
ize that they w^re in fact independent of Great 
Britain, except in political ways, and the realization 
of that truth very strongly tempted them to that 
declaration of political independence which was in- 
evitable and which was presently to come. 



CHAPTER XVII 



BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 



WHEN the great French and Indian War 
ended, in 1763, in the destruction of the 
French power in America, a new impetus 
was given to the migratory habits of the Americans. 
These were men and women whose fathers and 
mothers had come out across three thousand miles 
of sea and braved the hardships of the wilderness, 
and the terrors of Indian war, in order to better 
their condition and the condition of their sons and 
daughters after them. These men and women had 
therefore inherited the migratory habit, and they 
were constantly upon the lookout for opportunities 
to better themselves by changes of residence. 

The destruction of the French power had opened 
to them all that magnificently fruitful region which 
lay between the AUeghenies and the Mississippi, 
and they were prompt to avail themselves of the 
opportunity thus offered for their betterment. As 
a consequence there was a prompt secondary migra- 

183 



184 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

tion westward and southward between 1760 and the 
outbreak of the Revolution. This migration took 
many courses and resulted in much of consequence. 
The Germans who had so largely settled in Penn- 
sylvania, moved southward in numbers along the 
fruitful valley that lies between the Blue Ridge and 




A Conestoga wagon in the Bull's Head Yard, Philadelphia. 

the Alleghenies. They established ■ farmsteads, 
opened fields and planted orchards throughout all 
that rich region, the poorer among them even 
settling far up on the mountain sides where land 
was cheapest. They built there homes of their own. 
These people are even now ignorantly called 



BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 



185 



"Pennsylvania Dutch." They were in fact Ger- 
mans, or the children of Germans. 

Wherever they went they built substantially. In 
the main their houses were of stone. They were 
plain but they were spacious and comfortable. Even 
their barns and their corncribs were in many cases 
built of the stones that lay ready to their hands, 
and their prosperity was 
as substantial as their 
buildings. 

They lived much 
within themselves. 
Each farmstead pro- 
vided abundantly for all 
its own wants, and gave 
little attention to markets in which to buy or to 
sell. 

This tide of migration poured on down through 
Maryland, Virginia, and on into the Carolinas. 
These " Pennsylvania Dutch " were a sturdy race, 
self-reliant, resolute, and thoroughly capable of 
making the most of their opportunities and their 
surroundings. They planted fruits of every kind, 
they opened fields and they cultivated them faith- 
fully. They set up their cider presses. They made 
applebutter, They grew great herds of swine and 




A pack horse. 



186 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



sheep and cattle. In short they became a pecu- 
liarly and very comfortably independent people, with 
a purpose as resolute as that of their English fellow- 
colonists to insist upon being let alone. 

The so-called "Scotch-Irish" also were much 
given to this secondary migration. They were a 
daring and courageous people who did not flinch 
from hardship on the one hand, or from Indian 
war on the other, and they had a keen sense of the 
" main chance." They too moved down the valley 
of Virginia and established themselves there and in 
the mountains to the South, with resolute intent to 
make there their homes and to defend them against 
all comers. As Mrs. Margaret J. Preston has said 
in a noble poem, they were men " with blood in 

their veins and iron 
in their blood." 
Their service to the 
American cause 
A wooden tray. during the Revolu- 

tion was very great. In the meanwhile they were 
building up by their industry a prosperity for them- 
selves the result of which endures even to our time. 
It was from sources such as these, and others of 
like kind, that the regions west of the mountains 
were presently populated. Now that the great West 




BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 



187 



belonged to the Americans these people and a mul- 
titude of Virginians and Carolinians, pushed rapidly 
over the mountains and settled there in order to 
take advantage of the fruitful soil and favorable 
climate for the upbuilding of prosperity for them- 
selves and their families. 

They went into the Ohio country under the grant 
that had been given to the first 
Ohio Company. These emi- 
grants settled mainly along the 
Ohio River and its tributaries, 
a region fruitful in the extreme, 
where the forests furnished all 
the materials they needed for 
building, and where the fields 
needed only to be " tickled with a hoe that they 
might laugh with a harvest." 

The people in the Ohio country and to the south 
of it were as yet without a market for the products 
of their farms and there was at that time no prospect 
of such a market. But at least they produced upon 
their farms everything that they needed, and they 
could live, as it were, within themselves. 

This they did. They had fields teeming with 
wheat and corn, other fields blue with flax and still 
others white with cotton. They had flocks and 




Skillets. 



188 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

herds in abundance, that ted fat upon the sponta- 
neous growth of grasses in that country. If they 
wished to build, there were stones and timber im- 
mediately at hand. The springs and wells of that 
region furnished them all that they wanted of water. 
The waterfalls turned the wheels of the mills they 
needed for the grinding of their grains. Their sheep 
wandered upon the hillsides, closely cropped the 
grass, and grew fat upon it. Their cattle waded 
knee deep in the green lusciousness of the lowlands. 
Their flocks of geese furnished them with all the 
material they needed for comfortable beds. Their 
turkeys and chickens fed fat upon the waste of their 
granaries. Their rivers and creeks yielded them 
fish in abundance and wild fowl at certain seasons. 
They were a happy people, absolutely independent 
of all the rest of the world, so far as the supplying 
of their wants was concerned, and they knew no 
other needs. 

But the Ohio country was not the only one occu- 
pied at that time by enterprising emigrants from 
the colonies further east. About i 769 a considerable 
migration set in towarci the peculiarly fertile and 
fascinating region which now constitutes the states 
of Tennessee and Kentucky. These men were 
mainly hunters^ adventurers ^nd explorers who went 






BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 



189 



in advance of civilization to " spy out the land." 
The Indians called them the " Long Knives." 
They went usually each man by himself, each tak- 
ing his life in his hand, risking Indian massacre, 
and without comrades to depend upon, plunged 
into the wilderness, there to maintain himself by his 
own exertions and his own sagacity. 

There were some 
great men among 
these. Fa m o u s 
among them were 
James Robertson, 
John Sevier, Daniel 
Boone, Isaac Shelby 
and Simon Kenton. 

Some of them went 
out merely as hunt- 
ers in search of game. 
Some of them were 
surveyors. Some of them, like Daniel Boone, were 
restless pioneers, hunting for a home so remote from 
all other men's habitations that no sound of other 
men's activities might reach them. It is related of 
Daniel Boone, for instance, that on one occasion he 
abandoned the home he had made for himself and 
moved farther west because a neighbor had settled 




Daniel Boone 



190 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



within a dozen miles of him and he thought the 
country was becoming too crowded to hold him 
comfortably. 

Some of these men, however, were settlers, bent 
upon building up little colonies west of the moun- 
tains. Among these were James Robertson and 
John Sevier who, about 1772, with a company of 

their friends settled 
on the creek or little 
river known as the 
Watauga in what is 
now the State of 
Tennessee. 

All that region 
belonged at that 
time to North Caro- 
lina, but Sevier and 
Robertson and their 
comrades did not 



Old windmill 

like the arbitrary rule of the royal governor of North 
Carolina and so, after the manner of men in the wil- 
derness, they set up a government for themselves. 
During the next six years Watauga governed itself 
as an independent state. In fact this might be called 
the first absolutely sovereign and independent State 
ever established in America. It was located in the 




BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 



191 



wilderness, but its people knew how to take care of 
themselves. 

After a while the settlers established in Ken- 
tucky — which was then a part of Virginia — became 
so numerous that the Indians made war upon them 




A needle work sampler. 

and undertook to drive them back over the moun- 
tains. But Virginia was a province strongly dis- 
posed to take care of its people wherever they might 
go and still more strongly disposed to assert its 
authority over all regions that belonged to it. So 
when the savages went to war, Virginia organized a 



192 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

little army and sent it out to overcome them, \n 
1774 this Virginia army encountered the Indians 
at Point Pleasant and so completely defeated them 
that a permanent peace was made. After that 
Virginians and Carolinians in increasing numbers 
removed to the western wilderness. 

The favorite region of settlement at that time was 
that which lay between the Kentucky 
River, which enters the Ohio be- 
tween Cincinnati and Louisville, and 
the Cumberland River, which de- 
bouches into the Ohio hundreds of 
miles further west — the region since 

From portrait of , rr 1 1 1 >> 

Mrs. Mary Sinibert ^Hown as the blue grass country, 
(about 1735)- This region was at that time called 

Transylvania, Settlers slowly went into that domain 
and in the absence of government of any kind from 
the outside they presently set up a little state of their 
own. They were beset by Indian enemies, but they 
knew how to deal with their foes. They organized 
a little army of their own, under the leadership of a 
young Virginian named George Rogers Clark, who 
was destined a little later to accomplish one of the 
great campaigns of the Revolution, In the mean- 
while he successfully defended the little Transylvania 
region against its Indian enemies and built up there 




BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS 193 

a state of no mean consequence. In 1776 he went 
back to Virginia and induced the legislature of that 
state to organize the Transylvania country into a 
Virginia county to be called the County of Ken- 
tucky. 

Thus the region west of the mountains was 
settled, before the Revolution began, by a sturdy, 
hard-fisted, straight-shooting and daring race of 
men who were destined to play an important part in 
the struggle of the American colonies for inde- 
pendence. 

It is to be borne in mind that all these men, 
whether in the colonies of the east or in the settle- 
ments of the west, had ceased to be mere colonists 
and had become Americans with an American im- 
pulse and inspiration. They were the men who 
were destined presently to combat English preten- 
sion with arms, and to assert once for all the ab- 
solute and unconditioned right of the American 
people to govern themselves. 

Thus was preparation made, by circumstances 
and by the character of the people concerned, for 
that vital struggle which is known in history as the 
American Revolution. 



M 



CHAPTER XVIII 

THE APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 

IN this volume, and the one preceding it, we have 
sketched the history of the colonies from the 
foundation of the first permanent settlement at 
Jamestown in Virginia (1607), to the time (1775) 
when the stupidity and injustice of English dealings 
with the colonies forced upon the Americans a war 
for independence. It is a curious fact that that war 
for independence was never formally declared and 
was never recognized by the British government as 
existing, until its end came in British defeat. 

The Treaty of Peace which closed it with a recog- 
nition of American independence was absolutely the 
first formal act of the British government that recog- 
nized the legitimate existence of such a war. The 
colonies had been declared to be " in rebellion," and 
in 1775 Parliament passed an act forbidding "trade 
and intercourse " with them on the ground that 
" they have set themselves in open rebellion and 
defiance to the just and legal authority of King and 
194 



APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 195 

Parliament." But until the very end of the war its 
status as war was in nowise recognized by British 
authority. And even after that treaty of peace was 
signed, and diplomatic relations were opened be- 
tween Great Britain and the new republic in Amer- 
ica, English statesmanship continued to regard both 
the war and its consequences as temporary incidents 




Phi] ipse Manor, Yonkeis, N. Y., as it formerly appeared. 



in colonial government and not at all the revolution 
that they were. 

The war of 1 8 12-18 15, has been sometimes 
called the second war for independence. This is in 
recognition of the fact that until that second war was 
fought out, English statesmanship did not regard 



196 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the independence of the United States as a perma- 
nent fact, or as anything more than a temporary and 
passing circumstance. 

Having thus traced the history of Hfe in the 
colonies from their beginning until that point at 
which they asserted and prepared themselves to 
make good their independence of the mother coun- 
try, it seems desirable to summarize the conditions 
that had marked their progress and that ultimately 
led them into revolt and revolution. 

The first colony at Jamestown, as we know, was 
founded with little discretion. The first colonists 
were a peculiarly unfit company to undertake such 
work as they were commissioned to do. Their sur- 
roundings and conditions still further rendered their 
problem difficult. Without women or children 
among them, without families, without any private 
ownership of land, and without the smallest capacity 
to avail themselves of the resources that the country 
in which they had settled offered in great abundance, 
their success in establishing a permanent colony at 
that time is an event that must always be regarded 
as almost miraculous. 

A little later better men came to them together 
with some worse ones ; but little by little the colony 
learned how to live in America and how to prosper 



APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 197 



,, ._iiii.^#^-vt5^^ m 








198 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

here. Then came a still better immigration and with 
it a still greater prosperity. 

The men and women who landed at Plymouth 
were a good deal better qualified than the earlier 
Virginians had been for the work they had to do, 
and the men and women who later founded Massa- 
chusetts Bay colony were still 
better equipped with ability and 
character. After these three 
colonies were permanently es- 
tablished it was inevitable that 
men of capacity of every kind. 

From portrait of Mrs. r ^ „ • j ^ 

^, V, , , , men or enterprise, determina- 

1 nomas Boylston (about '■ 

1765). tion, helpfulness and courage, 

should continually come out to join them and help 
them accomplish the great things that had been 
marked out for them to do. 

The other colonies followed naturally upon the 
success of these, and quite inevitably. 

Three kinds of government prevailed in the colo- 
nies : The first was the proprietary government in 
which an Englishman, or an English company, owned 
the whole enterprise and directed it at pleasure. 
The second was the royal government under which 
the king of England appointed a royal governor for 
the colony at his own good pleasure. In the royal 




APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 199 

governor was vested the right to veto the laws made 
by the colonial legislature and in other ways to in- 
terfere with popular self-government. Finally, there 
were charter governments, under which the people 
of each colony were granted certain rights of self- 
government by free grace of the king. Attempts 
have been made to classify colonial 
governments more scientifically than 
this, but without such refinements, the 
old classification here adopted answers 
all purposes of a brief history like this, 
and it was the one accepted by the 

colonists themselves. Black silk bonnet. 

Most, though not all of the colonies passed 
through two or all three of these stages. 

Virginia and the Carolinas were originally owned 
by corporate proprietors in England, but they early 
threw off the intolerable burden of government by 
Lords Proprietors or by English corporations, and 
accepted in its stead the scarcely less oppressive 
system of government known as royal. They were 
constantly more or less in revolt against that govern- 
ment after it had been established, but at least they 
found it better than the proprietary system which 
had preceded it. Much the same history had been 
that of the other colonies, and when the resistance 



200 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

of the Americans to English oppression crystalHzed 
itself into war in 1775, Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia, 
the two Carolinas and New Hampshire were all 
under royal governments. Pennsylvania, Delaware 
and Maryland alone remained proprietary colonies. 
The rule of the proprietors in those three colonies 
had been so mild and so reasonable that their people 
had never been driven to ask for royal authority in 
its stead, though in Pennsylvania a party, of whom 
Franklin was one, earnestly sought the substitution 
of royal for proprietary rule. Connecticut and 
Rhode Island were charter colonies to the end of 
that period and even after the end. They had had 
the good fortune to receive charters 
at an early time which guaranteed to 
their people so much of liberty and 
self-government that those two colo- 
nies were in fact almost independent 
republics on a small scale. They 
governed themselves as they pleased 
and were successful, as we have before 
seen, in resisting the attempts made by royal author- 
ity to take their charters away from them, and bring 
them under the rule of a foreign power. 

Massachusetts also was possessed of a charter, but 
its governor was a man appointed by the king 




APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 201 

and was usually in antagonism to the will of the 
people. Indeed, toward the end of the period of 
which we are now treating, Massachusetts had in fact 
two governments, independent of each other, and 
distinctly antagonistic. The royal authority was 
dominant in Boston, but outside of that city the 
people of the colony had set up for themselves a 
government of their own and to it alone they yielded 
allegiance. 

It was out of this situation indeed that the first 
armed conflict of the Revolution arose. 

Connecticut and Rhode Island were intensely 
democratic, and so were New Jersey and Pennsyl- 
vania. In the social and political life of those colo- 
nies there was only here and there a trace of anything 
resembling aristocracy. 

In Massachusetts the spirit of democracy was dom- 
inant, but there were great men and great families 
there, whose influence, politically and socially, was es- 
sentially aristocratic. In New York the old patroon 
system of the Dutch, with the large landholdings that 
it had involved, had created a race of patricians whose 
claim to aristocracy of birth and wealth has not 
ceased even unto this day, though the wealth has in 
many cases passed away. 

In Virginia and the Carolinas both government 



202 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



and society were aristocratic almost from the begin- 
ning. The influx of expatriated cavahers into Vir- 
ginia, and their success in establishing themselves as 
great plantation owners, had tended to give to them 
an influence altogether out of proportion to their 
numbers. 

In the Carolinas the original constitution of the 
colony had attempted to create an aristocracy, and 
later circumstances had in fact set up an aristocracy 

of land ownership, the force 
of which has not even yet 
expended itself. 

Yet in Virginia and the 
Carolinas the spirit of de- 
mocracy was felt at every 
point. Patrick Henry, " the 
Voice of the Revolution," 
was of plebeian origin and 
plebeian associations. Yet 
it was he who stirred the aristocratic Virginians to 
revolt, and the influence of that relentless lover of 
liberty was mighty in its pleadings for the poor, the 
commonplace, the common. 

In South Carolina it was the aristocrats themselves 
who selected John Rutledge to be first, the president 
of their colony, and afterwards their wonderfully 




Pewter chafing dish. 



APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 203 

successful war governor, during the " storm and 
stress " period of the Revolution. John Rutledge 
did not belong by right of birth to any of the pa- 
trician families of the Carolinas, but by virtue of his 
activity and success, his character, his genius, and his 
self-sacrificing patriotism, he made a patrician of him- 
self and founded a family that is to this day one of 
the foremost in that part of the country so far as 
popular recognition of its right to pride in its past 
is concerned. 

Georgia was thoroughly democratic from begin- 
ning to end by reason of the circumstances of its 
founding, and the character of the people whom 
Oglethorpe had settled there. Another thing that 
aided in making that colony democratic was the fact 
that for many years after its establishment slavery 
was not permitted there and neither was large land- 
holding. It was chiefly upon the possession of 
broad acres and the ownership of many slaves that 
the aristocracy of the south was built. These two 
conditions being absent from the Georgia system 
during the formative period of that colony, it was 
natural that no aristocratic class should grow up there. 

We have already seen how diverse conditions ex- 
isting in the several colonies, while they remained 
remote from each other, led to differences of a radi- 



204 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

cal kind in their systems of local self-government. 
But these were the natural outgrowths of circum- 
stances. They were political garments fitted exactly 
to the communities that must wear them. They 
involved nothing of difference in fundamental prin- 




The Royal Exchange for merchants. Jiuilt m 1752 on IJroad Street, 
N. v., nearly on the line of Water Street. 

ciple, though much of difference in the application of 
principle to practice. The dominating principle in 
all the colonies was that the people had a right to 
rule themselves in their own fashion, and to regulate 
their own affairs as they pleased. The differences 
related only to the methods by which this self- 
government should be carried on. The democratic 



APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 205 

town meeting ruled in New England, the aristocratic 
county court, in Virginia. But the one and the other 
ruled by virtue of the people's will that it should do 
so. The difference was solely one of method, not 
at all one of principle. In both cases the people 
were ruled by agencies of their own choosing and 
their own creation. The larger colonial govern- 
ments were from beginning to end much alike. 

It must be borne in mind that while the colonies 
were at first as remote from each other, so far as inter- 
communication was concerned, as if they had been 
planted upon different continents, their growth in 
population, wealth, commerce and independence, and 
still more the growth of a common cause among them 
had tended steadily to bring them more and more into 
communication with each other. Little by little they 
interchanged ideas with each other and little by lit- 
tle they had come to be more and more alike, both in 
their political institutions and in their social life. By 
the time that the Revolution approached they were 
practically one people with a common thought, a 
common purpose, a similar system of government 
and common ideals of human rights. 

This last idea indeed was a great bond of union 
among the colonists. From Massachusetts to 
Georgia it was everywhere held by the Americans 



206 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 




that they, as Englishmen in America, had a right — 
unaHenable and absolute — to govern themselves 
without interference from the outside. It was in 
assertion of that right that they had resisted one 
after another of the British encroachments upon 
their liberties. It was in assertion of that right 
that they were now prepared to make 
revolution and war. It was in assertion 
of that right that the Pinckneys and 
Rutledges of Carolina, the Henrys and 
JefFersons and Washingtons of Virginia, 
the Carrolls of Maryland, the Adamses 
Costume from ^nd Otises of Massachusetts, and the 

an old portrait. , ,. • n i i • r 

leadmg men in all other colonies, found 
themselves banded together with a common purpose 
and for the achievement of a common end. 

There were wide differences of view among them 
of course. Wealth, which is always and everywhere 
conservative, clung to the colonial relation as some- 
thing the disturbance of which might produce chaos 
and invoke black night. Thus not only as the 
Revolution approached, but throughout its progress 
there were in all the colonies, a number of people of 
estimable character among those who were called 
the " King's friends." These people were what the 
patriots of that time called tories. Not all of them 



APPROACH OF THE REVOLUTION 207 

were disloyal to the American cause during the 
Revolution. Many of them were men who simply 
held out as long as they could, in the hope that some 
basis of compromise, concession, and conciliation 
might be found by which the colonies in America 
should continue to be English possessions and the 
colonists should remain English subjects. When 
the issue of war finally came the greater number of 
these accepted the Declaration of Independence and 
went into the war with a determination to win it in 
behalf of American liberty. 

As an illustration of what is here meant it is an 
interesting fact that even Benjamin Franklin — in- 
grained democrat that he was, and fierce patriot 
that he proved himself to be, from beginning to end 
of the controversy — was so far imbued with the idea 
of conservatism that even after the " Boston Tea 
Party " had so emphatically expressed American 
ideas by its act, he urged compromise, and deliber- 
ately advised that the colony of Massachusetts 
should pay for the ninety thousand dollars worth of 
tea destroyed by the Bostonians, as perhaps it ought 
to have done. 

Some of the tories upon principle and conviction 
continued to be such after the war of the Revolution 
was on. They were conscientious men who sin- 



208 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

cerely believed the colonists to be wrong in their 
contentions and who regarded revolution as wrong, 
unnecessary and impolitic. But when war was on 
there developed also another kind of tory — a tory 
who sided with the British for the sake of personal 
advantage, or because of cowardice, or for some 
other unworthy motive — a butcherer of his neigh- 
bors, a conspirator against his fellow-men, a self- 
seeker of the basest kind, who hesitated at no act 
of vandalism in pursuit of his purposes. 



CHAPTER XIX 

HEALTH CONDITIONS AND PECULIARITIES OF LIFE 
IN THE COLONIES 

IT must not be supposed that the Americans of 
that time were living in anything hke the con- 
ditions in which Americans Hve to-day. Even 
in the largest cities there was nowhere any such 
thing as a paved street except a little space in Phil- 
adelphia, which Franklin had induced the city to 
cover with cobblestones. The streetways were 
mere dirt roads. There was no arrangement in 
most of the towns for the removal of dust, ashes, 
garbage or litter of any kind. These things were 
dumped into alleys, or into vacant lots, or some- 
times into the streets, to fester there and breed dis- 
ease. Nothing was known in that age of what we 
now regard as hygienic commonplaces. Only the 
Dutch in New York attended somewhat to street 
cleaning, chiefly as a matter of neatness. 

It was understood indeed that decaying meat, 
vegetables and the like, trampled into the mud of 
N 209 



210 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

the streets, might be a menace to health, and so in 
many of the cities and towns, the authorities per- 
mitted herds of hogs to be turned loose in the 
streets to serve as scavengers. This practice con- 
tinued in some of the cities till the middle of the 
nineteenth century. In the more southern cities, 
and particularly in Charleston, S. C, great flocks 
of carrion crows were depended upon to do the 
work of scavengers. The streets, especially about 
the market places, were thronged with these repulsive 
birds, and their protection by law from interference, 
bred an insolent tameness and self-assertive disposi- 
tion on their part which was picturesque even in its 
ofFensiveness. 

It must be borne in mind that in colonial times 
no city in all the land had any proper water supply. 
The people got their water from wells dug within 
the city itself. These wells were necessarily con- 
taminated by drainage from the reeking streets and 
from other and still fouler sources, for there were 
no sewers to carry off drainage, no plumbing in 
houses, nothing indeed in the way of municipal sani- 
tation, except the maintenance of the corporation 
hogs to eat what they might of the filth of the 
streets and still further to foul them. It is no won- 
der that the death rate in American cities in the 



I 



HEALTH CONDITIONS 211 

colonial period appears to have been appalling, com- 
pensated for only by the tendency to large families. 
Unfortunately we have no precise statistics concern- 
ing the death rate, but enough is shown by the 
records to justify us in regarding it as enormous. 

Smallpox was always prevalent, so much so that 
a person whose face showed no pittings was deemed 
almost a curiosity. Vaccination was not discovered 
by Jenner in England until near the end of the 
eighteenth century, but during the colonial period 
it was the general practice to inoculate persons with 
smallpox itself, after careful preparation, in order 
that they might have the disease under favorable 
circumstances, and thus escape the risk of having it 
later in unfavorable conditions. It was the custom 
for a number of friends to organize themselves into 
a smallpox party, take quarters together in the 
house of an inoculator, and there go through the 
experience in each other's company. 

It appears to have been thought that the pittings 
of the smallpox were rather ornamental than disfig- 
uring, when few in number and properly located 
upon the face. There remains to us the advertise- 
ment of one quack, who, professing a special skill 
acquired in the Orient, boasted his ability to minis- 
ter to feminine beauty by limiting the number of 



212 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

pits as desired and locating them wherever on the 
face the patient might think most becoming. 

So far as we can gather from the records that 
survive to us from that time, smallpox was far more 
prevalent in the northern than in the southern colo- 
nies. For this, two reasons at once suggest them- 
selves. In the first place this malady is a winter 
disease, prevailing chiefly in cold climates, and sec- 
ondly, like all other communicable diseases, it pre- 
vails in cities and towns far more generally than in 
the open country. As life at the North was largely 
in cities and towns, while at the South the people 
lived for the most part on plantations, remote from 
each other, it was to be expected that such a malady 
would find its most fivorable field of malignant ac- 
tivity at the North. 

Apart from the general municipal neglect of san- 
itation, there w^re other unhygienic conditions prev- 
alent in the daily life of the people. 

The ventilation of sleeping rooms by night was re- 
garded as dangerous. Windows were tightly closed, 
beds were closely curtained, and there was everywhere 
a terrible fear of breathing what was then called " the 
damp night air." Benjamin Franklin on one oc- 
casion made a journey across country in company 
with John Adams. Stopping overnight at a rural 



HEALTH CONDITIONS 213 

inn the two were put to sleep in a single bed, after the 
tavern custom of that time. Franklin desired to 
open a window, but John Adams objected on the 
ground that it was dangerous to breath the "damp 
night air." Franklin as a scientist knew better, and 
assured his companion that the night air was in fact 
no damper than the air of the daytime, but Adams 
could not reconcile himself to the belief that it was 
safe to sleep in a room with an open window. So 
Franklin humored him until he went to sleep. 
Then the great practical philosopher slipped out of 
bed, and without making any noise opened the win- 
dow to its full extent. The next morning Adams 
declared that he had rarely slept so well or so com- 
fortably, whereupon Franklin called his attention to 
the fact that he had slept in the midst of fresh air 
which had come through the surreptitiously opened 
window. Adams regarded the discovery as so im- 
portant that he wrote a letter about it. 

It is to be remembered, however, that while the 
people of that time did not open their windows at 
night for the sake of air, they always, in cold weather, 
had a fire burning in an open chimney with a vast 
throat, and that the burning of the fire caused a con- 
siderable ventilation. 

The air-tight box stove, which is at present used 



214 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

almost universally in New England, New York and 
other northern farmhouses for the sake of the heat 
that it yields, had not then been invented. There 
was nowhere a stove of any kind existing in all the 




A colonial kitchen. 



colonies. The first apparatus of that kind that was 
introduced was Franklin's stove, which he offered to 
the community " for the better heating of rooms." 
This was simply an open fireplace made of iron and 



PECULIARITIES OF LIFE 



215 



set in the middle of the room instead of being in- 
cased in a chimney. It very greatly economized 
heat and without doubt added considerably to the 
comfort of the people of that time. But it bore no 
relation to the box stove which later came into ex- 
istence. It served the same purpose that the open 
fireplace did in compelling the ventilation of rooms. 

Franklin might have made a 
fortune out of this invention if 
he had taken out a patent 
upon it but he refused to do 
so. His explanation of his 
refusal was that as we profit by 
the thoughts of other people 
we should let other people 
profit by our thoughts. 

In the South, of course, 
there v/as no need for stoves 
of any kind. The climate there was mild and when 
it was cold enough to require a fire the open wood 
fireplace, abundantly supplied with hickory or fat 
pine logs, answered all the purposes of the people. 

Many other things which we nowadays regard 
as essential to comfort in living were utterly lacking 
in colonial times, but they were not seriously missed 
by people who had n^ver been accustomed to them. 




216 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

In all the land, at the time when the Revolution 
was approaching, there was probably not a single 
bathroom in any house. No city had a water supply 
running through pipes into people's houses. Gas 
had not yet been introduced. The. electric light 
was not to be thought of until about a century later. 
Even coal oil was utterly unknown. People lighted 
their houses with candles and torches whenever they 
felt the need of any greater light than that which a 
fire of blazing logs supplied. These candles were 
all made at home, each family having candle molds 
and manufacturing its supplies from tallow rendered 
out of the fats of such beeves as they had occasion 
to kill. As these beeves were killed at long and ir- 
regular intervals, candle light was an expensive 
luxury and no candles were burned in most of the 
houses except under pressure of necessity. In the 
houses of the very well-to-do, there were lamps 
burning sperm oil and lard oil. But these lamps 
were lighted only upon special occasions because of 
the cost of the oil. 

An insistent Sabbatarianism existed in all the 
colonies, but particularly in New England. This 
strictness of Sunday observance manifested itself in 
many interesting ways. Nearly a hundred years 
later it was still a matter of serious controversy 



PECULIARITIES OF LIFE 217 

whether or not it was permissible for one to write 
letters to his friends on Sunday. In many houses 
almost a hundred years later all Sunday meals con- 
sisted of cold victuals, cooked on the day before, 
and those people who took the liberty of adding a 
cup of hot coffee or tea to the Sunday dinner were 
regarded as lax in their Sunday observances. In the 
greater number of colonial houses among the 
ordinarily well-to-do it was absolutely forbidden to 
light fires for purposes of cooking even of the 
smallest sort on the Lord's Day. 



CHAPTER XX 

THE PROSPERITY OF THE COLONIES 

DURING the colonial period the great majority 
of people everywhere thought it no wrong to 

hold negroes in slavery. As a consequence 
there were negro slaves in all the colonies. But as 
the value of their labor was very small at the North 
and very large at the South most of the negro 
slaves were held in the southern colonies. There 
was nowhere any law enacted directly to authorize 
any white man to hold any negro in slavery. All 
that was taken for granted, and was the common law 
of the time. Laws with respect to the treatment 
both of negro slaves and of white indentured serv- 
ants were common, but there w^as nowhere a spe- 
cific statute authorizing negro slavery. 

It is also true that the greater part of the white 
bondsmen sent out from England and sold into 
temporary servitude were purchased in the South. 
This was because of the great plantations there, 

218 



PROSPERITY OF THE COLONIES 219 

where farm labor, and such other labor as unskilled 
persons could perform, was in greater demand than 
in the northern colonies. 

In Virginia, as the Revolution approached, fully 
one half of the total population were negro slaves. 
There were also a great number of white bonds- 
men, so that in Virginia greatly more than one half 
of the population consisted of men bound in one 
way or another to service, and who had no part in 
the government of the community. 

This was not democratic, of course, and still less 
democratic was the provision of Virginian law that 
only those free white men who owned land in pre- 
scribed amounts should be permitted to share in 
the government as voters. 

In South Carolina — owing to the introduction of 
indigo culture, and owing also to the pestilential na- 
ture of the rice fields, in which negroes could live 
and be healthy at all seasons of the year, while 
white men could not live in them at all during the 
summer and autumn months — the negro slaves by 
this time very greatly outnumbered the total white 
population. An estimate, fairly trustworthy, reckons 
the population of South Carolina in 1773 ^^ sixty- 
five thousand whites and one hundred and ten 
thousand blacks. 



220 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH C5:NTURY 

These conditions in Virginia and the Carolinas 
went far to encourage and develop the aristocratic 
system that prevailed in those colonies. On the 
other hand, the sharp distinction between negroes 
and white men in those colonies led to the fullest 
possible political recognition of a white skin as nec- 
essary to entitle its owner to his share in the gov- 
ernment and even the man with the white skin was 
disfranchised unless he owned a specific amount of 
property. There was no such thing as equal man- 
hood suffrage in most of the colonies even among 
white men. Property and religious qualifications 
were insisted upon even after the Revolution. 

The colonies had by this time become populous 
in a degree which we now scarcely realize. As 
early as 1760 there were five hundred thousand 
people in Virginia and by 1775 this population had 
been increased by fifteen or twenty per cent. 

In Massachusetts there were three hundred 
thousand people in 1760, and the population there 
increased even more rapidly between that time and 
the outbreak of the Revolution than that of Vir- 
ginia had done. 

The New England colonies, taken together as a 
single group, had a population of more than six hun- 
dred thousand people. The population of the mid- 



PROSPERITY OF THE COLONIES 221 

die" colonies numbered no less than four hundred 
thousand men, women and children. 

In brief, a nation had been established and built 
up in America and it needed only the nagging in- 
terference of British aggression to induce this great 
population to assert its nationality and its right to 
self-government. 

In the southern and middle colonies a vast agri- 
cultural prosperity had been built up. These col- 
onies were producing wheat, and corn, and indigo, 
and rice, to say nothing of minor products, in such 
abundance that they were able to ship them to all 
parts of the world on board the New England built 
schooners and square-riggers, which were plough- 
ing every sea on the face of the earth, in search of 
profit for a people whose land was infertile and 
whose climate was inhospitable, but whose people 
were hardy, shrewd and enterprising. So great had 
this New England commerce become that at the 
time of the outbreak of the American Revolution 
it is estimated that New England alone had one 
ship at sea for every one hundred inhabitants 
within its borders. 

The method of this commerce is a matter of in- 
teresting study. A great many of the ships were 
built and owned not by great corporations or rich 



222 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



merchants but by the phiin people of the ports from 
which they sailed. Every one of the men who sailed 
in them, from captain to cabin boy, had an interest 
in the ship and in the profits of its cruising. The 
people of a little town would get together, decide 
upon building and sailing a ship and invest their little 
savings in what was called " the adventure." They 
~were all hardy sailors and skilled ones, trained to the 

service of the sea 
from their earliest 
boyhood, daring, 
resolute, shrewd, in- 
g e n i o u s. Often 
there was not a 
man on board over 
twenty years of age 
Old whale ships. f^^^ ^^^ captain to 

the scullion. The crew was a company of partners, 
every man of whom was interested in the success of 
whatever ventures the ship might undertake. It 
was usually the people of the town from which the 
ship sailed who furnished her with her outgoing 
cargo and it was through them that sale was made 
of any cargo that she might bring back. 

It is easy to see that a commerce of this kind was 
profitable in the extreme, and very easy to conduct. 




i 



PROSPERITY OF THE COLONIES 223 

The men knew how to sail a ship and they were not 
mere hirehngs whose interest in the voyage ended 
with the payment of their wages at its end. They 
were themselves joint owners of the ship and its 
cargo, and were to be at the end of the voyage 
sharers in whatever profits the voyage might yield. 
The enterprising ones among them looked forward 
confidently to the time when they should own and 
sail ships on their own account. 

Referring to this wonderful commerce built up in 
so short a time by a colonial people, Edmund Burke 
said this : 

" No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. 
No climate that is not witness of their toils. 
Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the ac- 
tivity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity 
of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous 
mode of industry to the extent to which it has been 
pushed by this resolute people — a people who are 
still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet 
hardened into the bone of manhood." 



CHAPTER XXI 

EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES PECULIAR CUSTOMS 

A PEOPLE SO busy as the Americans of that 
time were, both North and South, and so far 

more dependent upon physical exertion than 
upon intellectual resources for their prosperity, very 
naturally gave less attention to popular education 
than they might otherwise have done. Yet educa- 
tion was not neglected among them. Documents 
written in that time, and even such books anci news- 
papers as were printed then, show a laxity of spell- 
ing which in our days would be regarded as 
indicative of ignorance. It was the custom even of 
educated men to spell the verb be, " Bee " with a 
capital letter at the beginning of it and to spell other 
words in an equally eccentric manner. 

It should be borne in mind, however, that at that 
time the spelling of English words was not fully de- 
termined and fixed, even among the best scholars in 
England. It might almost be said that everybody, 
in the colonies at least, spelled words in Sam 

224 



EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES 225 

Weller's way, according to his own " taste and 
fancy." Correctness of spelling was therefore not 
at that time a test of education and culture as it is 
in our day. 

As to the use of capital letters at the beginning 
of words, the practice at that time differed radically 




King's College (nov; Columbia), Barclay Street and College Place, 
N. Y.; corner stone laid in 1756. 

from that of our own day. It was after the end of the 
Revolutionary War that Benjamin Franklin, who as 
a printer and a scholar was a special student of such 
matters, wrote a letter defending the older usage of 
beginning all the nouns^ verbs and other principal 
words in every sentence with capital letters. 

Arithmetic in the colonial period was taught upon 
o 



226 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

plans that would now be deemed preposterous. 
The multiplication of three or more figures by 
three or more other figures was accomplished by a 
process so ingeniously complicated that any school 
boy or girl of our time would look upon it as a 
veritable Chinese puzzle. 

Geography and history were not taught at all 
in the schools, but in New England the returning 




A form of stocks. 



sailors were unconscious missionaries of practical 
geographical learning. The more highly educated 
colonists were, of course, diligent readers of history 
for the sake of political instruction. Even the 
art of reading had no adequate aid from school 
books. Until long after the middle of the eight- 
eenth century there was no school " Reader " in 
existence anywhere. Indeed up to that time educa- 



EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES 227 



tion rested almost exclusively upon Latinity and in 
England as well as in this country the schoolmasters 
who set out to educate a boy — it was not thought 
necessary to educate girls — proceeded from begin- 
ning to end upon the theory that education con- 
sisted of a knowledge of Latin. A scholarly knowl- 
edge of the English language was regarded as a 
matter of no consequence whatever. 

At last, many years later, near the end of the 
century indeed, Lindley Murray put forth the first 
English grammar. 
Its conjugations 
were simply transla- 
tions of the Latin 
verb forms. It was 
in fact not an Eng- 
lish grammar at all, 

but an attempt to Ducking stool. 

present the English language in Latin harness. " I 
might, could, would or should have been loved " 
was set down as an inflection of the verb " to love," 
and other forms of speech equally far from being 
inflections of the verb were given as such. Thus 
the stream of English grammar was poisoned at its 
fountain head, and even unto this day it has not 
been fully disinfected although intelligent school- 




22<S LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

masters in our time have done much to rid the 
teaching of EngHsh of its Latin swaddHng clothes. 
There is a pecuHar fact which deserves mention. 
There were no steel or gold pens in existence in the 
colonial times. The only pens in use were whittled 
out of goose quills, and every man had to make 
them for himself as best he could. Such pens rap- 
idly softened under the chemical action of ink. and 
they were quickly worn out by the friction of writ- 
ing. Yet a comparison of the manuscripts of that 
time with those of the present shows clearly that the 
men and women of the later colonial period with 
their very imperfect implements wrote, as a rule, 
more legibly, more neatly, and more elegantly, than 
do the majority of the men and women at the begin- 
ning of the twentieth century. 

Another peculiar fact is that 
while there were no text-books 
of grammar or rhetoric in school 
use at that time, the men of the 
later colonial and the revolu- 
tionary periods wrote and spoke 
the English language with an 
A scold, gagged. ease, a grace, a vigor and an ef- 

fectiveness, which the best writers ard speakers of 
to-day might well envy. The English of Samuel 




EDUCATION .IN THE COLONIES 229 

Adams, James Otis, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jeffer- 
son, and a multitude of their fellows, was graceful 
and masterful in a degree that is rarely matched in 
our later and more technically instructed time. 

Under laws which have been referred to in a pre- 
vious chapter, popular schools were early established 
in Massachusetts and the other New England colo- 
nies, for the education of all the people in the arts 
of reading, writing, and " the casting of accounts." 
But their methods of instruction were crude and 
their results meager in the extreme. In the other 
colonies even these imperfect aids to popular educa- 
tion scarcely at all existed. 

Yet there was everywhere a concern for educa- 
tion. In the middle and southern colonies there 
were a few academies for the education of such 
youths as could afford to attend them. 

There were " old field schools " also, particularly 
in Virginia. The old field school was held usually 
in a rude log house in the midst of the scrub pines 
which had grown up in a field that had been ex- 
hausted of its fertility by unwise cultivation. It was 
a pay school always and its discipline was that of 
the oxgoad. Its master was usually a scholarly 
personage who thrashed Latin into his pupils with 
very Httle concern for anything else. They might 



230 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

spell English words as they pleased without en- 
countering any serious objection on his part, but the 
use of a false quantity in the construction of a Latin 
verse was apt to awaken his ire. 

Many of the greater planters employed scholarly 
men to serve as tutors to their children and from 
that source, perhaps, more than from any other, in 
T:he South at least, came the education of that time 
which produced the great men of the revolutionary 
period. John Marshall, the greatest jurist whom 
this country has ever known, and one of the greatest 
jurists in all the history of the world, was educated 
almost entirely in this way. 

But there were colleges also — more of them than 
are commonly thought of. Harvard was established 
in 1636; William and Mary in Virginia in 1693; 
Yale in Connecticut in 1700; Princeton in 1746; 
King's College — now Columbia in New York City — 
in 1754; the College of Philadelphia — now the 
University of Pennsylvania — in 1755; Brown Uni- 
versity at Providence, Rhode Island, in 1764; Dart- 
mouth in New Hampshire in 1769; Rutgers in 
New Jersey in 1770. 

In these institutions of learning the sons of men 
who had means were educated as fully and as well 
as it was possible to educate them at that time. 



EDUCATION IN THE COLONIES 231 

In the South it became customary for planters of 
adequate means to send at least one son of each 
family to Europe to be educated there. These 
young men were sent chiefly to Oxford or Cam- 
bridge in England, but some of them were sent to 
Paris or to the German universities. Their educa- 
tion thus included something more than scholastic 
training, and they brought back with them to this 
country the enlightenment and the broadened minds 
which travel and contact with the men and the insti- 
tutions, the habits, the customs and the ways of liv- 
ing of other nations alone can give. 

In one respect the educated Americans of that 
time were peculiarly well educated. It was said of 
them by a great English observer that they were, 
almost all of them, men learned in the law. As we 
read the records of that time the reason for this 
is obvious enough. These men were engaged in 
a continuous struggle for their rights as English- 
men and in that struggle their attention was centered 
constantly upon the broad principles of English 
law. Those of them who were lawyers by pro- 
fession were learned and able lawyers — many of 
them even great in their profession. Samuel 
Adams, John Adamis, James Otis, John Marshall, 
Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry— 



232 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

there were never anywhere greater lawyers than 
these. But among the educated folk of New Eng- 
land and the southern colonies even those men who 
were not lawyers by profession were trained by daily 
thought and constant controversy into a knowledge 
of the broad principles of law, such as no law school 
of the present day gives to its graduates. 

In theological learning also the clergymen of the 
colonial times excelled. They were masters not 
only of all that had gone before in theological con- 
troversy and all that was then known of logistics, 
but they were grand masters also of the art of pre- 
senting and enforcing theological thought in an ef- 
fective and convincing way. Such men as Jonathan 
Edwards and his kind have known no superiors in 
their profession from that day to this. 

In medicine, on the other hand, the grossest ig- 
norance and superstition prevailed. It is not too 
much to say that medical science was not yet born 
in the eighteenth century. It was not born indeed 
until after the middle of the nineteenth century. In 
colonial times doctors were very easily made. Some- 
times a young man went to a medical college in Eng- 
land or Scotland for a brief course, saw a single sub- 
ject dissected, but did no dissection himself; heard 
two or three courses of lectures, and at the end of the 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 233 

nine or ten months, was graduated as a full-fledged 
physician. Usually the medical student did not at- 
tend any college, but merely " rode with a doctor " 
for a year or so. He knew less in fact when he re- 
ceived his diploma or set himself up in practice 
without a diploma, than the medical student of to- 
day learns in the first year or even in the first month 
of his study. 

The doctors of that time believed largely in 
charms. They knew nothing of the causes of dis- 
ease. If a man had a fever they bled him until the 
fever abated. They gave him medicines many of 
which are now known to be absolutely without any 
medicinal effect whatever. If a man had an intesti- 
nal trouble which the doctor of to-day would diagnos- 
ticate as appendicitis, they let him die, and called it 
cramp colic. Such surgery as they knew in that time 
had not taught them how to operate for the relief of 
many of the commonest and most dangerous ail- 
ments to which human flesh is heir. 

In dealing with wounds their methods were crude 
and even cruel. They knew nothing of anaesthet- 
ics and their knowledge even of the disinfection of 
wounds was crude and empirical. 

For example, during the Revolutionary War, if a 
man had a wound in his leg or his arm which required 



II 



234 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

that the member should be cut off, the amputation 
was done by the surgeon without the administration 
of anything that might ease the pain and at the end 
of it the stump of the amputated Hmb was plunged 
into hot tar. This prevented destructive inflam- 
mation, but it involved an enormous amount of suf- 
fering on the part of the patient. 

Many of the doctors of that time were acquainted 
with less than a dozen drugs. They knew little of 
anatomy, nothing of chemistry, and almost nothing 
of hygiene. They were full of superstitions. It 
was the practice of many of them to carry around 
with them a cane, in the head of which certain herbs 
were inclosed. When they were present in the sick- 
room of a smallpox patient, for example, they smelt 
of this cane head as a means of preventing themselves 
from taking the disease. Curiously enough they do 
not appear to have offered similar cane heads for 
the use of their patients or of the friends of their 
patients. ^ 

It is hard for us to realize the conditions of life 
during the colonial period, especially those con- 
ditions which were created by reason of ignorance or 
neglect. So far as historians can discover there was 
no part of the country, north or south, in which any 
householder or any merchant stored ice in the winter 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 235 

for use in the summer. The result of this was that 
in the summer time meats, and milk, and other 
things, that require refrigeration to preserve them. 




In a New England meeting house. 

were dependent upon such coolness as spring 
houses might afford. 

There were no stoves in existence and there were 



236 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

no furnaces for the better heating of houses, no steam 
heat appliances and no hot water suppHes. 

Even the churches were without heat of any kind. 
There are records in New England documents of 
that time showing that people attended services, 
which lasted for hours at a time, when the tempera- 
ture in the church was many degrees below zero. 
The patience of the people in this respect is largely 
to be accounted for by their devotion to religion as 
the primary concern of human beings. In every 
house there were family prayers, night and morning, 
which every member of the household was expected 
to attend. At every meal there was grace said be- 
fore meat and thanks given afterward. In every 
house it was deemed not only a duty but a delight 
to entertain the preacher, and the preachers in their 
turn held it to be their duty to assemble the family, 
speak words of admonition to them and hold prayers 
in their presence. 

In New England the government of the people 
was exceedingly minute, the town meeting regulating 
everything that concerned the common interest. It 
chose selectmen to administer " the town's will," 
as that will had been expressed in the town meeting. 
It selected a constable to keep order and a clerk to 

keep a record of the town's affairs. This record 

/ 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 237 

was minute and varied in its character. It included 
almost everything that could in any way affect the 
public interest. 

Professor Andrew C. McLaughlin, in his very in- 
teresting " History of the American Nation," gives 
some extracts from town records, illustrating the 
extent and the minuteness of government in that 
time and the varied character of the records kept. 

Among the passages quoted by Professor Mc- 
Laughlin is this one : 

" It is ordered that all doggs, for the space of three 
weeks after the piblishinge hereof, shall have one legg 
tied up . . . If a man refuses to tye up his dogg's 
legg and he Bee found scraping up fish in the corne 
field the man shall pay twelve shillings besides what- 
ever damage the dogg doth." 

This enactment was made, without doubt, in the 
interest of New England agriculture. The cultiva- 
tors had learned from the Indians to enrich their 
fields by burying fish in the corn-hills, and the 
underfed dogs of that time were apparently accus- 
tomed to plunder the corn of its nutriment. 

Professor McLaughlin tells us, as have other 
writers upon the history of that time, that births, 
deaths and marriages, the transfer of pews in the 
meeting house, the taking up of stray animals, etc.. 



238 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

were all recorded by the clerk in the town records. 
Mr. McLaughlin quotes for example a record con- 
cerning an estray that had been taken up which 
reads as follows : 

" A Red Stray Hefer two years old and she hath 
sum white In the face." 

He quotes also some records showing the cattle 
marks adopted by the different farmers for the identi- 
fication of their animals running wild upon the com- 
mon lands. One of these reads as follows : 

"Joshua Brigs mark Is a Seward Crop In the 
underside of ye Right ear." 

The town meeting appointed men to do everything 
that needed to be done for the governance and regu- 
lation of life in the town. 

Quoting again from McLaughlin, we give this 
list of the petty officers appointed in a single town : 

Tithing men, fence viewers, hog reeves, measurers 
of wood, overseers of measurers of wood, " men to 
take care of the Alewives not Being stopped from 
going up the Revers to cast their sporns." Men to 
prevent cheating by those who sold lumber, " be- 
cause bundles of shingles are marked for a greater 
number than what they contain." Wardens to in- 
spect " ye meeting house on ye Lord's Day, and see 
to Good Order among ye Boys ; " Cattle pounders. 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 



239 



sealers of leather, game keepers " to Bee the men 
for Prevesation of the Deare for the year Insu- 



mf 



The religious sentiment in the New England 
colonies strongly discouraged public amusements of 
every kind as sinful indulgences unworthy of men 




Present territory of the United States, showing by whom it was claimed 
before 1763. 

and women with souls to be saved. Indeed there 
is strong reason to believe that in many stern minds 
of that time and country, happiness itself was a sin 
sure to be visited with punishment in a future life. 
But neither laws nor the restraints of a misguided 



240 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

public opinion can alter human nature or successfully 
thwart its impulses. The New England people, de- 
prived as they were of theaters, shows, balls and 
other entertainments, found amusement and diver- 
sion in attending the solemn lectures upon religious 
themes which were common in that region. In 
every town and village the weekly " lecture day," 
became a time of social intercourse and enjoyment. 
The lectures were very long, and doubtless very dry 
discourses, but they afforded an opportunity for 
meeting one's neighbors, and for more or less of 
social visiting. They were held about midday, partly 
because of the scarcity and cost of candles, and partly 
because those who attended them, as pretty nearly 
everybody did, must make long homeward journeys 
afterwards. As a consequence, lecture day meant a 
day practically lost from work, and as many of the 
people were accustomed to attend lectures in three 
or four different towns each week and on different 
days, the indulgence took on the character of a 
dissipation seriously hurtful to the public pros- 
perity. It became necessary at last to regulate the 
practice by law and restrain undue indulgence in 
it. 

In Boston curfew was rung at nine o'clock every 
night, and at that hour everybody was expected to 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 241 

go to bed. Another abuse with which the law had 
at last to interfere, was common to both the north- 
ern and the southern colonies. This was the lavish 
feasting at funerals. There is a record showing 
that the wine alone drunk at one Virginia funeral, 
cost no less than four thousand pounds of tobacco. 
It was the custom at funerals for the bereaved family, 
besides the giving of a costly feast to those in at- 
tendance, to furnish each with a pair of rather ex- 




The Beekman Coach. 

pensive gloves. At one Massachusetts funeral no 
less than three thousand pairs of gloves were thus 
bestowed, and an old New York letter, still pre- 
served, tells us that its writer, by frequent attendance 
upon funerals, had accumulated a supply of gloves 
p 



242 LIFE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

sufficient to last a lifetime. It was necessary at 
last to impose legal restraint upon these excesses 
in some of the colonies, in order that the funeral 
might not impoverish the bereaved survivors of the 
family. 

Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century 
there were very few wheeled vehicles of any kind in 
the colonies. But as the settlements were extended 
inland, roads were opened and wheeled carriages came 
more and more into use. During the early part of 
the eighteenth century, however, these were all light 
shays, and it was not until that century was well 
advanced that heavier carriages of the kind then 
known as coaches appeared. Because of the bad- 
ness of the roads the coaches were very heavily 
built and were usually drawn by four horses. Only 
the rich could afford them, and the " setting up of a 
coach " was therefore an accepted indication of 
wealth. Often it was also a sign of ostentation. 

In this volume and its predecessor " Our First 
Century," an effort has been made to show forth in 
some degree the conditions of life, and the manners, 
customs and habits of thought that prevailed in the 
English colonies in America during the period of 
nearly one hundred and seventy years that elapsed 
between the planting of the first settlement at James- 



PECULIAR CUSTOMS 243 

town, and the outbreak of the Revolution. It is a 
record of nation-building unsurpassed in the world's 
history as a story of courage, energy, endurance and 
heroic endeavor. 



THE END 



APPENDIX 

TABLE OF IMPORTANT CONTEMPO- 
RANEOUS EVENTS 



ENGLAND. 



ENGLISH COLONIES. 



FRENCH-SPANISH 
COLONIES. 



Act of Settlement, 1701. 
The Grand Alliance, 1701. 
Deatliof William III, 1702. 



Queen Anne, 1702-1714. 
War with France, 1702-1713 

(Spanish .succession). 
Marlborough's victory at 

Blenheim, 1704. 



Union of England and 
Scotland, 1707. 

Landingof. Tames Edward, 
"Tlie Old Pretender," in 
Scotland, 1708. 



Act estab. Colonial Post 
Office, 1710. 



Treaty of Utrecht with 
France, 1713. 

The Assiento Treaty with 
Spain, 1713. 

George I, 1714-1727. 

Jacobite Rising in Scot- 
land, 1715-16. 



Vale College founded, (Detroit founded, 1701. 
1701. Mobile founded, 1701. 

Pennsylvania Charter of 
PrivilegCii, 1701. 

New Jersey a Royal Prov- 
ince, 1702. 

Delaware separates from 
Pennsylvania, 1702-03. 

Queen Anne's War, 1702-13. 



French and Indians de- 
stroy Deerfield, Mass., 
1704. 

.Spanish and French attack 
on South Carolina, 1706. 



French and Indian attack 
on Haverhill, Mass., 
1708. 

Immigration of the Pala- 
tines to New York and 
other Germans to Penn- 
sylvania, 1709. 



Indian wars in North Car- 
olina, 1711-13. 



Maryland again a Proprie- 
tary Province, 1715. 

Gov. Spotswood of Vir- 
ginia explores the Blue 
Ridge, 1716. 

Increase of German and 
begin'ng of Scotch-Irish 
immigration to Pennsyl- 
vania, 1717-27. 



New England expedition 
against Port Royal 
failed, 1707. 



English capture Port Roy- 
al, change name to An- 
napolis, 1710. 

LTiisuccessful expedition 
against Canada, 1711. 

Cession of Nova Scotia 
and Newfoundland to 
Great Britain, 1713. 



NewOrleans founded, 1717. 



245 



246 



APPENDIX 



ENGLAND. 



ENGLISH COLONIES. 



FKENCH-SPANTSH 
COLONIES. 



Rev. against Proprietary 
Govt, iu South Carolina, 
1719-20. 
Attack upon the Colonial First Royal Gov. in South 



i;h;u-ters. 17'20-21. 
The South Sea Bubble, 

IT'-tV-'l. 
Administration of Robert 

Walpole, 1721-42. 



Carolina, 1721 
Defence of jNIassachusetts 

Charter, 1721 
Massachusett.s Explana- 
tory Charter, 1 
Contest over the sal.ary of 

the Governor in ^lassa- 

cliusetts, 1728-35. 
North Carolina becomes a 

Royal Province, 1729, 
Division of North and 

South Carolina 



Actrestrictinghatmanuf. Georgia Charter, 1732. 

in Colonies, 1732. | 

Molasses .\ct, regulating Savannah founded, 1733. 

Colonial trade, 1733. 

.Salzburgers and Scotch- 
Highlanders in Georgia, 
1734-3G. 
Act restraining Colonial New Jersey separate Roy- 
woolen manuf., 1738. al Governor, 1738. 



War with Spain, 1739-1748. 

Act prohibiting paper 

money iu Colonies, 1740. 



WarwithFrance, 1744-1748 
(Austrian Succession) 



The Rising of the Young 
Pretender: Second .Jac- 
obite Rebellion, 1745. 
Defeat at Culloden. 

The Treaty of Aix-la-Cha- 
pelle, 174S. 



Act restricting iron manti- 

faciure in Colonies, 1750. 
New .A.ct against paper 

money in Colonies, 1751. 
Adoption of the Reform 

or Gregorian Calendar, 

1752. 



Vincemies founded, 1735. 



Oglethorpe's expedition 
against Florida, 174(). 

Colonists join expedition 
against Cuba, a failure, 
1741. 



New Hampshire, separate 
Royal Governor, 1741. 

Spanish attack on Georgia 
repulsed, 1742. 

King George's War, 1744- 
1748. 

New England troops cap- 
ture Louisburg, 1744. 



Louisburg returned to 

France, 1748. 
Toronto founded, 1749. 
Tlie Ohio Company char- French expedition to the 



tered, 1749. 



Nova Scotia colonized by 
the English govt., 1750." 



Georgia a Roval Province, 
1752. 



Ohio Valley, 1749. 
Boundary dispute over 
Nova Scotia, 1750. 



Gov. Duquesne's proclam- 
ation, 175;?. 

Establisliment of Ft. Du- 
quesne, 17.">3. 

Washington's mission to 
the French, 1753. 



APPENDIX 



247 



ENGLAND. 



ENGLISH COLONIES. 



FRENCH-SPANISH 
COLONIES. 



War with France, 1755-63, 
(Seven Years' War.) 



Newcastle-Pitt Ministry, 
1757-1761. 



Battle of Quiberon Bay, 
1759. 

George III, 1700-1820. 

Pitt resigns, 1701. 

Act regulating naturali- 
zation in the Colonies, 
1761. 

War declared against 
Spain, January, 1762. 

Treaty of Paris, 1763. 

Ministry of George Gren- 
ville, 1763-65. 



John Wilkes and No. 45, 

"North Briton," 1763. 
Parliament asserts right 

to tax Colonies, March, 

1704. 
Sugar Act, April, 1764. 
Stamp Act, March, 1765. 
Quartering Act, April, 

1705. 
Rockingham's Ministry, 

1765-00. 
Examination of Franklin 

by House of Commons. 
Repeal of Stamp Act, 

March, 1766. 



Colonial Congress at Al- 
bany, 1754. 
Plan of union. 

French and Indian War, 
1754-176:3. 

Braddock's defeat, 1755. 

Colonial governors pro- 
pose a stamp tax, etc., 
1755. 

Massacre at Ft. William 
Henry, 1757. 

English capture Ft. Du- 
quesne, 1758. 
Renamed Ft. Pitt. 

English capture Niagara 
and Ticonderoga, 1759. 

Argument on Writs of As 
sistance in Massachu- 
setts, by Otis, 1761. 



Pontiac's conspiracy, 1763 
Proclamation Line estab 

October, 1763. 
English Colonies of East 

and West Florida estab. 

The Parson's Case in Vir- 
ginia, 1763. 

Otis on The Rights of the 
Colonies, 1764. 



Henry's Resolution adopt- 
ed by Virginia Asseni 
bly. May, 1765. 

Massachusetts calls a Co- 
lonial Congress, June, 
1765. 

Stamp Act Congress, Oc- 
tober, 1765. 



Washington's expedition 
against the Fort, 1754. 



English capture Louis- 
burg, 1758. 

Capture of Quebec, 1759. 
Surrender of Montreal 
and all Canada, 1760. 



Capture of French West 

Indies, 1762. 
Capture of Havana from 

Spanish, 1762. 
Cession of Louisiana to 

Spain, 1762. 
French lose all possession 

on continent, 1763. 
Spain exchanges Florida 

for Havana, 1763. 



248 



APPENDIX 



ENGLAND. 



ENGLISH COLONIES. 



Grafton Ministry, 1 767-1 770. 

Act suspending New York Assem- 
bly, June, 1767. 

Townshend Acts, June-July, 1767. 
Act estab. Customs Com. 
Revenue Act. 
Tea Act. 



"Wilkes' election and expulsion 
from Parliament, 1768-1769. 



Lord North's Ministry, 1 770-1 7S2. 
Repeal of the Revenue Act (ex- 
cept tea), 1770. 



The Intolerable Acts, 1774. 
Boston Port Act, March. 
Mass. Govt. Act, May. 
Adm. of Justice Act, May. 
Quebec Act, May. 
Quartering Act, June. 



Dickinson's " Farmers' Letters," 
1767. 

" Sons of Liberty " organized, 1767- 
68. 

Massachusetts Circular Letter, Feb- 
ruary, 1768. 

Massachusetts Assembly dissolved, 
1768. 



Arrival of British troops in Boston, 

October, 1768. 
Treaty of P^t. Stanwix, 1768. 
Early settlements in Tennessee, 

1769. 
Virginia Resolutions, May, 1769. 
The Boston Massacre, 1770. 



The " Regulators ' 
North Carolina, 



" Insurrection in 
1771. 



Destruction of the "Gaspee," 1772. 

Local Committees of Correspon- 
dence in Massachusetts, 1772. 

Watauga Association (Tenn.), 
1772. 

Resolutions of Virginia. 

Colonial Committees of Corre- 
spondence, 1773. 

Resistance to the landing of the 
tea, 1773. 

Boston Tea Party, December, 1773. 

Lord Dunmore's Indian War, 1774. 

Massachusetts Legislature calls a 
Continental Congress, June 17, 

1774- 

Continental Congress in Philadel- 
phia, September-October, 1774. 

Massachusetts Provincial Congress, 
October, 1774. 



APPENDIX 



249 



ENGLAND. 



ENGLISH COLONIES. 



Attempted repeal of the Intolerable 
Acts, 1775. 

Lord North Conciliatory Resolu- 
tions, February, 1775. 

New England Restraining Act, 
March, 1775. 



King's Proclamation of Rebellion, 

August 22, 1775. 



Act prohibiting trade with Ameri- 
ca, December 22, 1775. 



Battles of Lexington and Concord, 
April 19, 1775. 

Settlements in Kentucky, 1775. 

Second Continental Congress as- 
sembles. May, 1775. 

Washington's appointment as com- 
mander of army, June, 1775. 

Battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 

1775- 
Declaration of causes for taking up 

arms, July 6, 1775. 
Petition to the King, July 8, 1775. 
Rejection of North's Conciliatory 

Resolution, July 31, 1775. 
Siege of Boston, July, 1775-March, 

1776. 

Congress recommends New Hamp- 
shire and South Carolina to or- 
ganize governments, November, 

1775- 
Expedition against Quebec, 1775- 

76. 



INDEX 



A BERCROMBY, General, 102, 103. 
Academies, 229. 

Acadia, conquered by the English, 
25 > 77 i 82 ; people of dispersed, 

83. 
Acts, Molasses and Sugar, 112; 

Navigation, 112, 167; Stamp 

Act, 130, 131 ; Act of Repeal, 

173 ; Intolerable Acts, 177-180 ; 

Boston Port Bill, 177; Quebec 

Act, 177. 
Adams, John, 170, 206, 212, 213, 

231. 
Adams, Samuel, 153, 154, 163, 169, 

206, 229, 23T. 
"Adventure," the, 222. 
Advocate General, 115. 
Aristocracy, colonial, 201, 202, 

205 ; and ownership of slaves, 

203 ; in Va., 220. 
Affairs, public, 149, 150 ; right to 

regulate, 204. 
Agriculture, in the South, 126, 

134. 145' 221 ;in Penn., 127, 134; 

in New England, 136; regulation 

of, 237. 
Albany, convention at, 74. 
Alleghenies, region west of, 58, 

103; chapter on, 183 et seq. 
Amherst, General, 94, 104. 
Amusements, and religious senti- 
ment, 239 ; of the New England 

people, 240, 241, 242. 
Annapolis Royal, 25, 55. 

251 



Antagonism, spirit of, 109, 115; 

see Revolt, Revolution. 
Arithmetic, 225, 226. 
Arms, 68. 

Art, worksof, 42; imported, 141. 
Assembly, representative, 87 

House of Burgesses, 98, 146 

willingness of, to levy tax, 116 

town meeting, in Boston, 162 . 

see Burgesses, Congress, Town 

Meeting. 
Assertion of rights, chap, on, 156 

et seq.; British, to govern, 165 ; 

Colonial, 154, 204. 
Assistance, writs of, 115, 116, 123. 
Authority, spirit of revolt from, 

6 ; local, in New England, 86; 

resistance to British, 1 14 ; British, 

in Boston, 201. 



B 



Baltimore, 138. 

" Blue grass country," 192. 

Blunder, British, 127, 128. 

Books, text, 226, 228. 

Boone, Daniel, 189. 

Boroughs, rotten and pocket, 1 18, 
119. 

Boston, 115, 132, 138, 154, 160, 
161; "Massacre," 162 ; town 
meeting, 162; "Tea Party," 176, 
177, 207; "Port Bill," 177; sup- 
ported by the colonies, 180; 
royal authority in, 201 ; curfew 
in, 240. 



252 



INDEX 



Braddock, character of, 76, 97 ; 
sent to America, 76 ; marched 
against Fort Duquesne, 77-81 ; 
campaign of, a failure, 82. 

Bradstreet, General, 96. 

Bricks, ii ; made in America, 14; 
Dutch and English models, 15. 

Bridges, 88. 

British, foreign affairs, 94 ; 
blunder, 127, 128; aggression of, 
130, 150, 154; right to govern, 
165 ; see Parliament, Trade laws. 

Brown University, 230. 

Bruce, 87. 

Burke, Edmund, 165 ; on colonial 
commerce, 203. 

Burge.sses, House of, 98, 99, 100, 
146, J47, 151 ; resolutions of, 153; 
appointed a " Committee of Cor- 
respondence," 171. 



C 



Carroll, 206. 

Canada, French in, 103, 104 ; Que- 
bec, 104 ; surrender of, 105; gov- 
ernment of, 179. 

Candles, 216, 240. 

Carolina, North, 190. 

Carolina, South, Huguenot im- 
migration, 31 ; culture of indigo 
in, 47-49 ; against influx of slaves, 
1 10; negro slaves in, 219; stamped 
paper in, 132 ; committee of cor- 
respondence in, 171 ; tea in, 176; 
aided Boston, 180; John Rut- 
ledge, 202 ; population of, 219. 

Carollnas, gentry in, 5; Hugue- 
nots in, 5; Scotch-Irish left, 6 ; 
brick houses in, 14 ; life in, chap, 
on, 39 et seq.; nearly destroyed, 
48; Indian war, 49; grievances, 
127; migration to, 185; people 
of, settled in the West, 192; pro- 
prietary government, 199; under 
royal control, 200 ; aristocracy 
and democracy in, 202, 220. 

Catholics, 5, 35. 

Cause, common, 180, 205, 206. 



Cavaliers, 5, 31, 201. 

Challenge, to king and Parlia- 
ment, 157 ; to governor and coun- 
cil, 163. 

Charms, behef in, 233. 

Champlain, Lake, 104. 

Charleston, 42, 44, 136, 176, 210. 

Charter, Mass., 178. 

Chatham, Earl of, 94, 165. 

Churches, 236, 

Cincinnati, 62. 

Cities, in the South, 136, streets 
in, 210; growth of, 143; largest, 
life in, 209. 

Civil, unit in the South, 87, 88. 

Claims, territorial, 239. 

Clakk, George Rogers, 192, 193. 

Classes, in the colonies, 10; negro 
slaves, white servants, 1 1 ; friction 
among, 119, 120 ; see Servants, 
Slavery. 

Clei;gy, supported by the people, 
146; salary paid in tobacco, 146 ; 
petition to British go\ernment, 
147 ; act of the House of Bur- 
gesses, 147; learning of, 232; re- 
ception of, by the people, 236. 

Coaches, 242. 

Colleges, 230. 

Colonial, period, characteristics 
of, 52 et stq. ; first independent 
war, chap, on, 61 et seq.; repre- 
sentatives at Albany, 74 ; individ- 
ually, chap, on, 84 et seq. ; expe- 
dition.s, 95 ; grievances, chap, on, 
107 et seq.; resistance, 114, 149 ; 
antagonism, 115; revolt against 
trade laws, 116; opposition to 
British policy, 124, 149; wealth 
and luxury, chap, on, 134 et seq.; 
challenge to king and Parliament, 
157 ; riots, 162, 169 ; demand sent 
to governor and council, 163 ; 
smuggling, 167 ; affairs and the 
Revolution, 195; government, 
proprietary, royal, 198, charter, 
199; aristocracy and democracy, 
201, 202; water supply, 210; popu- 
lation, in V^. *ncl Mass,, 229, 



INDEX 



253 



in the middle colonies, 221 ; pros- 
perity, chap, on, 218 et seq. ; 
products, 221 ; commerce, 221- 
223, Burke on, 223; education, 
chap, on, 224 et seq. ; lawyers, 
231, 232; doctors, 232, 234; rec- 
ords, 212, 236, 237, 23S ; nation- 
building, 243. 
Colonies, spirit of revolt, S ; organ- 
ized by the English, 9 ; classes in, 
10; "feeders" of English pros- 
perity, 16, 20, 181 ; influences at 
work in, 22, 203; vexed by wars, 
22 (see Wars); made war upon 
the French, 25 (see French); at- 
tacked by the Spanish, 25 (see 
Spanish) ; troubled by the In- 
dians, 26 (see Indians) ; problems 
of, chap, on, 73 et seq., 1 1 1 ; not 
united, 74; jealousy in, 76, 90; 
Franklin's plan of union for, 75 ; 
communication between, 84 (see 
Commerce) ; centralization of, 84, 
85, 205 (see Union) ; institutions 
in, 85 ; local self-government, 87 
(see Government) ; voted troops, 
95 (see Troops) ; social systems 
in, 107 ; relation to England, 109 
(see England); public sentiment 
in, 112; Puritan, 120, 125, 126; 
wealth and lu.xury, chap, on, 134 
et seq. ; middle, 134, 145 (see 
New Jersey, New York, I'ennsyl- 
vania); asserted the right to 
govern, 154; common cause of, 
156; called a Congress, 156 (see 
Congress) ; policy of, 1 59 ; united 
resistance of, 161 (see Resis- 
tance) ; troops sent to overawe, 
161 (see Troops) ; non-importa- 
tion agreement, 161, conciliation, 
time for, 167, hoped for, 207 ; 
drifting toward revolution, chap, 
on, 171 et seq. (see Revolution); 
committees of correspondence, 
171 ; aided Boston, 180 (see Bo.s- 
ton) ; service of " Scotch-Irish " 
to, 1 86 (see "Scotch-Irish"); 
declared "in rebellion," 194; pro- 



prietary, royal, 19S ; charter, 199; 
remoteness of, 203 ; unification of, 
205 ; health conditions in, chap, 
on, 209 et seq. ; smallpox in, 211, 
212; prosperity of, chap, on, 218 
et seq.; negro slavery in, 11, 109, 
no. III, 203, 218, 219 (see Slav- 
ery); population, 11, 22, 125, 136, 
138, 220; education in, chap, on, 
224 et seq. (see Education) ; ex- 
cesses in, 241, 242; vehicles in, 
242. 
Colonists, dependent upon Eng- 
land, 1,2; enjoyed fruits of Eng- 
lish manufactures, 2 ; organized 
trade, 3 ; in New England, 4, 85- 
87 (see New England) ; in Mary- 
land, 4, 5 ; spirit of protest, 5, 
131 ; spirit of revolt, 6 (see Re- 
volt, Revolution) ; fundamental 
idea, 6 ; work of xvii. century, 
8, 9; manufactures of, 17-20 
(see Trade Laws) ; afflicted by 
wars, 22 ( see Wars) ; at close of 
King William's War, 24; prob- 
lems of, 59, chapter on, 73 et seq.. 
Ill; in the Carolinas, 39 (see 
Carolina, Carolinas ) ; based claims 
on the Cabot discoveries, 63 ; 
Englishmen in America, 73, 74, 
122, 123, 125; Englishmen in Eng- 
land, loS ; Albany Convention, 
74 ; rejected plan of union, 76, 90 
(see Franklin) ; united under 
Braddock, 77 (see Braddock) ; 
Braddock's defeat a lesson, 82 ; 
life of, in the middle of the xviii, 
century, 84 (see life) ; in the 
South, 87-90 (see South) ; social 
and political differences of, 84-90 ; 
jealousy among, go ; secured the 
Ohio valley, 103 ; Navigation Act, 
112; Sugar and Molasses Act, 
112; evasions of, 1 13, 1 14 ; accept 
Otis's dictum, 116 (see Otis); in- 
difference of Eng. to, 125 ; troops, 
quartered upon, 1 27, to overawe, 
128; real objection of, to the 
" Stamp Act," 130, 131 ; defended 



254 



INDEX 



by Henry, 148 (see Henry); re- 
sisted imposts, 160 ; " the iJoston 
Massacre," 162; asserted right to 
govern, 165; resistance of, 169, 
173, 174 (see Resistance) ; inde- 
pendence repulsive to, 170, real- 
ized, 182 (see Independence), tax 
on tea, 173^ 174; willingness to 
levy tax, 174; non-importation 
policy, 181; resources of, 181, 182; 
migrated, 183 (see Migration) ; 
and the " Penn. Dutch," 185, 186 
(see Penn.) ; became Americans, 

- 193 ; declared " in rebellion,'' 194 ; 
at Jamestown, 196, 197 ; at Plym- 
outh, 1 98; Mass. Bay, 198; 
self-government of, 199 (see Gov- 
ernment); unification of, 205; 
religious devotion of, 236 (see 
Religion) ; amusements of, 239, 
241. 

Colony, planting, xvii. century, 8, 
Carolina, 48, 122; at Jamestown 
194, 196; Plymouth, 198; Mass, 
Bay, 1 98. 

Columbia College, 230. 

Commerce, in New England, 112, 
126, 136, 2^1, 222, blow to, 112; 
"Boston Port Bill," 177; growth 
of cities, 138. 

Commons, House of, 117 ; see Par- 
liament. 

Communication, between the col- 
onies, 84 ; Canada and the ]\Iis- 
sissippi valley, 103. 

Conciliation, time for, 167 ; 
hoped for, 207. 

Congress, representative assembly, 
129; called by the colonies, 156; 
challenge to king and Parlia- 
ment, 157; held in Phila., 180; 
non-importation policy, 181. 

Conflict, inevitable, 20; "irre- 
pressible," 163. 

Connecticut, immigrants to, 6, 
171, 179; under charter govern- 
ment, 200; democracy in, 201; 
Vale, founded in, 230. 

Conservatism, 108. 



" Continentals," 68. 

Constitution, and Franklin's plan 
of union, 75, 76. 

Co-operation, sought for, 93. 

Corn, 221, 237. 

Correspondence, committees of, 
171. 

Crown Point, 77, 81,95, 102, 104. 

Courts, county, functions of, 88; 
issued writs, 1 23, and stamped pa- 
per, 133; " Parson's Cause," 149; 
aristocratic, 205. 

Cotton, 45. 

County, unit, 88 ; court, 88. 

Curfew, 240. 

Currency, tobacco, 146; actual, 
146. 

Customs, commissioner of, 114; 
officers resisted, 123; Boston, 
160, 161. 



D 



Darmouth College, 230. 

Death Rate, 210, 211. 

Declaration, of Independence, 
154 ; accepted by the tories, 207 ; 
of political independence, 182. 

Declaration of Rights and Griev- 
ances, 157. 

Delaware, 200. 

Democracy, colonial, 201 ; versus 
aristocracy, 201, 202; in Geor- 
gia, 203. 

DiESKAU, Baron, 81. 

DiNWiDDiE, governor, 64, 66, 76. 

Discontent, in the colonies, 5, 
109. 

Dolls, fashion models, 142. 

Drainage, 210. 

Dress, 141-143. 

Drugs, 233, 234. 

Duquesne, 63. 

DuQUESNE, Fort, 69, 77, 95-98, 
103. 

Di TCii, Penn., 29, 185; in N. Y., 
loS, 209. 

Duties, 167; see Trade Laws. 



INDEX 



255 



Education, in the South, 88, 229, 
231 ; in the colonies, chap, on, 
224 at seq.; spelling, 224, 225; 
capitalization, 225 ; arithmetic, 
225, 226; multiplication, geogra- 
phy and history, reading, 226 ; 
teaching of English, 227, 228 ; 
schools in New England, 226, 229 ; 
text books, 226 ; primary and sec- 
ondary, 229 ; " old field schools," 
229 ; higher, 230. 

Edwards, Jonathan, 232. 

Eighteenth Century, opening 
of, 9 ; medical science in, 232 ; use 
of wheeled vehicles, 242. 

Eloquence, of Samuel Adams, 163 
(see Henry). 

Emancipation, early problem of, 
III. 

England, encouraged production 
of iron, 17; war with Spain, 52; 
with France, 54 ; attitude of, to- 
ward America, 58, 92, 109, 113, 
125, 181 ; appeal of Dinwiddle to, 
76 ; payment of Franklin's bill, 
78, 79 ; encouraged the slave 
trade, 1 10 (see Slavery) ; govern- 
ment in, 117 ; dominated by the 
tories, 165. 

English Settlements, 24 ; armies 
■ in, 93; growth of, 107. 



Federal Idea, 90. 

Fee Simple, 36. 

Fisheries, 134, 136. 

Florida, 25, 49, 54. 

Forbes, General, 96, 97, 98. 

P'ox, 165. 

Franklin, Benjamin, in the Al- 
bany Convention, 74 ; plan of 
union, 75, 76, 84, 90 ; call of, to 
the farmers, 78 ; favored royal 
government, 200 ; urged compro- 
mise, 207 ; favored the building 
of good streets, 209; journey with 



John Adams, 212, 213; invented 
a stove, 214, 215. 

French, 24-26 ; at war with the 
English, 54-57 ; French and In- 
dian War, 63-71, 107, 183; 
claimed the Allegheny region, 
66 ; forces, 67 ; drove back Trent, 
69; defeated Washington, 71 ; 
expeditions against, 77 ; power 
destroyed, chap, on 92 et. seq., 
96, 103; surrendered Quebec, 
105; West India Islands, 112; 
power broken, 127. 

Frontenac, Fort, 96, 103. 

Fry, Colonel, 71. 

P'unerals, 241, 242. 



Gaspee, 167, 168. 

Georgia, colony of, chapter on, 32 
et seq.; country conquered by 
Colonel Moore, 25 ; proprietary 
government under Oglethorpe, 
34 et seq.; life in, chapter on, 39 
et seq. ; character of settlers, 42- 
44 ; invaded by the Spaniards, 54 ; 
aided Boston, 180 ; sympathy of, 
with Congress, 180; under royal 
government, 200 ; democracy in, 
203 ; no slavery in, 203. 

George, Lake, 94, 104. 

George II., land grant to Ogle- 
thorpe, 33, 34. 

George III., character of, 113, 114, 
166, 167 ; enforced the trade 
laws, 167. 

Geography and history, 226. 

Germans, came to America for re- 
ligious and political reasons, 28 ; 
influence of, 28 ; immigrated to 
N. York, then to Pennsylvania, 
28 ; in Georgia, 35 ; in Penn., 28, 
108 ; migrated southward, 184, 
called " Penn. Dutch," 185. 

Girls, education of, 227. 

Gist, Christopher, 62, 66, 67. 

Gloucester, 138. 

Government, in Georgia, under 



256 



INDEX 



Oglethorpe, 36 ; in the Caiohiias, 
50, 199; general, in F"ranklin's 
plan, 75 ; liberty and functions of, 
86, 87 ; ideal of free, 87 ; town, 87 ; 
plantation, 88; country, 88 ; gen- 
eral, attitude toward, 90, 91 ; new 
systems of, 107; in Eng., 117, 
120; proprietary, 198, 200; royal, 
198, 200 ; chapter, 199, 200 ; of Va., 
199; of Mass., 200, 201 ; popular, 
in Mass., 201 ; free right of, 206 ; 
in New Eng., 236-239 ; ofificers of, 
238. 

Governor, royal and council, 163, 
165, 198, 199; in Mass., 200. 

Grant, of land, in Va., 10; by 
George II. to Oglethorpe, 33, 34 ; 
by Virginia,to the Ohio Company, 
61 ; to Mass., N. Y.,and Va., 179. 

Grenville, 113, 130. 

Grievances, colonial, chap, on, 107 
et seq. 



H 



Harvard Coli.ege, 230. 

Health, conditions of, in the colo- 
nies, chap, on, 209 et seq. 

Heating, 236 (see Stoves"). 

Henry, Patrick, chap, on, 145 et 
seq.; "Parsons' Cause," 14S ; in- 
fluence of, 150, 169 ; in House of 
Burgesses, 150, resolutions of, 
151; "the voice of the Revolu- 
tion," 202 ; spirit of, 169, 206 ; the 
English of, 229 ; an American 
lawyer, 231. 

History and Geography, 226. 

Hopkins, Stephen, 169. 

Hostility, between the colonies 
and England, 21; between the 
French and English colonies, 26 
(see Revolt, Revolution). 

House of Burgesses, (see Bur- 
gesses). 

Houses, ii, 15 (see Life). 

Howe, Lord, 102. 

Huguenots, 5, 31. 

Hutchinson, Anne, 6. 



Idea, federal, 90; dominant, 119, 
interchange of, 205 (see Resis- 
tance, Revolt, Revolution). 

Immigration, in Virginia, 9, 10, 
general influence of, 10; during 
first half of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, 27 ; German, 28 ; of Scotch- 
Irish, 29, 30 ; of Huguenots, or 
French Protestants, 30; slave, 
no; into Jamestown, 196, 197. 

Imposts, i 12, 160 ; resisted, 160 (see 
Stamp Act). 

Independence, idea of, 59, 91, 125, 
155, 169, 170, 1S2 ; local, 21, 75, 
90 ; in early times, 85 ; of the plan- 
tations, 87, 134; industrial, 151; 
political, 182 ; declared, 175 ; in 
Ohio country, 187, 188; of Wa- 
tauga, 190 ; conditions that led to, 
I94et seq. ; in the charter colonies, 
200; Second War of Indepen- 
dence, 195. 

Indiana, 61. 

Indians, currency used among, 18; 
King William's War, 24 ; incur- 
sions of, encouraged by the 
French, 26 ; liked Oglethorpe, 35 ; 
Westoes, 48 ; Tuscaroras, 48, 49 ; 
Iroquois, 48, 49, 73, 74 ; Yemassee, 
48, 49 ; sold into slavery, 49 ; 
Great French and Indian War, 
62,71, 107, 183; joined French, 
in expedition into the Ohio Val- 
ley, 62 ; encountered ly Washing- 
ton, 64 ; warfare of, understood 
by Washington, 79, 80 ; French 
and Indians under Montcalm, 94; 
lost confidence in the French, 104; 
colonists competent to meet, 128 ; 
made war on Kentucky settlers, 
191 ; defeated at Point Pleasant, 
192; attacked state in Tran.syl- 
vania, 192; contribution to New 
England agriculture, 237 (see Col- 
onists, French, Wars). 

Indigo, culture of, 46, 47, 48, 219; 
fully introduced, 47, 221, 



INDEX 



257 



Influences, affecting the colonies, 

22. 

Individuality, colonial, chap, on, 
84 et seq. ; versus govt., 87 ; strong 
feeling of, 90. 

Injustice, of the Stamp Act, 130; 
of the Navigation Act, 167 ; grew 
intolerable, see Trade Laws 170; 
caused the Revolution, 194. 

Inoculation, 211. 

Institutions, New England Town 
Meeting, 8 ; Virginia County 
Court, 88 ; in the seventeenth 
century, 9 ; development of, 85. 

Interference, of British govern- 
ment, 147, 221 ; speech of Henry 
on, 148. 

"Intolerable Acts," 177-180. 

Iroquois, 48, 49, 73, 74 ; see In- 
dians. 



Jamestown, 194, 196, 242. 

Jealousy, 91. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 87, 151, 152, 

170, 206, 229, 231, 
Jenner, 211. 
Jews, in Georgia, 35. 
Johnson, Fort, 132. 
Johnson, Sir William, 81. 

K 

Kenton, Simon, 189. 

Kentucky, 61, 188; attacked by 
the Indians, 191 ; defended by 
Clark, 192; organized, 193. 

King's College, (Columbia), 230. 

King George's War, 54 et seq. 

King William's War, 24. 



Labor, unskilled, 219. 

La Salle, 63. 

Latin, study of, 227, 229. 

Law, slave trade, 218; Virginian, 
219 ; study of, 231, 232, attracted 
the best men, 231 ; regulated 



" lectures," 240 ; feasting and ex- 
cesses, 241, 242. 

Laws, see Trade Laws. 

Le Bceuf, Fort, 66. 

" Lectures," 240. 

Liberty, spirit of, in the colonies, 
6 ; influence of English laws upon 
spirit of, 19; revolt in name of, 
during eighteenth century, 8 ; pop- 
ular, 86, 87 ; fear of encroach- 
ment upon, 90 ; new ideas of, 
107; English, 107, 116; endan- 
gered, 115; English, 116; de- 
stroyed in Mass., 178 ; guaranteed 
in the charter colonies, 200 ; Hen- 
ry pleaded for, 202 ; tories fought 
in the behalf of, 207. 

Life, in the eighteenth century, 
chapter on, i et seq. ; among the 
well-to-do, 2, 3 ; in New England, 
85, 87, regulation of, 109, 238; 
amusements, 239, 246 ; in Mary- 
land and the Carolinas, 4, 5 ; in . 
Pennsylvania, 5, 185, 186; houses I 
of the early colonists, 10; use of I 
brick in building, 1 1 ; influence ' 
of immigration, 27 ; in Georgia 
and the Carolinas, chapter on, 39 
et seq. ; in middle of eighteenth 
century, 84 ; development of in- 
stitutions, 85 ; in the South, 87- 
90, 136 ; school, in the South, 88- 
90; conditionsof, 108; homes de- 
fended as a " castle," 123 ; colonial 
wealth and luxury, chap, on, 1 34 
et seq. ; in the plantation house 
136, 138; dress, 141-143 ; of com- 
mon people, 143 ; among the 
"Penn. Dutch," 185, 186; "Scotch- 
Irish," 186; in the Ohio country, 
187, 188; among the Pioneers, 
189, 193; in Transylvania, 193; 
in early colony at Jamestown, 
196 ; Mass. and N. Y., 201 ; people 
brought together, 205 ; health 
conditions and peculiarities of, 
chap, on, 209 et seq. ; in the 
largest cities, 209 ; in southern 
cities, 210. 



258 



INDEX 



Lighting, facilities for, 216. 
Local, authority in New England, 

86, 87 ; see Government. 
Longfellow, " Evangeline," 82. 
"Long Knives," 189. 
LouisBURG, 55, 104; fall of, and 

return to France, 57 ; menace to 

New England, 57, 58 ; attack 

upon, 93, 96. 
Loudoun, Earl of, 92-94. 
Loyalty, to England, 59, 60, 107, 

125, 126, 157, 170. 
Lucas, Eliza, introduced indigo, 

45-47- 
XuxuRY, colonial, chap, on, 134 et 
seq. ; in dress, 141, 143; in house- 
hold furnishings, 143. 



M 



Magna Charta, 124. 

Manufactures, colonists bought 
English, I, 2; colonial, 138, 140; 
prior to the Revolution, 181 ; see 
Trade Laws. 

Marshall, John, 230, 231. 

Maryland, gentry in, Catholi- 
cism, 5 ; migration into, 185; un- 
der proprietary govt., 200. 

Massacre, in Boston, 162. 

Massachusetts, 122, 138, 171,179; 
lack of toleration in, 6; manu- 
facturing in, 138; stamp tax in, 
154 ; protest of, 161 ; with Vir- 
ginia, acted as a leader, 171; 
"Massachusetts Bill," 178, 179; 
legislature, call of, 180 ; charter, 
200; govt, in, 201 ; democracy 
in, 201 ; Franklin's advice to, 207; 
population of, 220; schools in, 
229; funerals in, 241, 242 ; see 
Boston. 

Mason, George, 231. 

Medicine, study of, 232, 233. 

Middle colonies, 134, 145; popu- 
lation of, 221 ; agriculture in, 221 ; 
academies in, 229 ; see Maryland, 
N. J., N. v., Penn. 

Migration, of the *' Penn. Dutch," 



184-186; of the "Scotch-Irish," 
186; toward the Kentucky and 
Tennessee region, 188-193. 

Military, colony, in Georgia, 37 ; 
forces, compared with those of 
the French, 67 ; no funds for, 78 ; 
English, 93 ; rule, 93, 95, 103, 162, 
178. 

Mississippi River, 63 ; region, chap, 
on, 1S3 et seq. 

Mob, Boston, 162; Providence, 
169. 

Molasses and Sugar Act, 112. 

Money, tobacco used as, 146; ac- 
tual, 146. 

Montcalm, Marquis de, 92, 93, 
victory of, 94 ; protected Quebec; 
105 ; surrendered to Wolfe, 105. 

Moore, Colonel, 25. 

Mountains, beyond the, chap, on, 
I S3 et seq. 

Multiplication, teaching of, 226. 

Murray, Lindley, 227. 



N 



Navigation Act, 112, 167. 

Nationality, independent, 141. 

Necessity, Fort, 71. 

Negro, soldiers, 49 ; see Slavery. 

New England, conditions in, 4, 
108; Town Meeting, 8, 162,205; 
clergymen formed class in, 10 ; 
P'rench a menace, 55 ; plan to de- 
stroy privateers. 56 ; Louisburg a 
center of depredation, 57 ; life in, 
85-S7 ; government in, 87, 236- 
239 ; contrasts to, in the South, 
87 et seq. ; Navigation Act, 112, 
167; commerce and prosperity 
of, 112, 126, 127, 134, 168, 221- 
223; agriculture in, 136, 237; in- 
terests of, T45 ; population of, 
220; schools in, 226, 229; educated 
men in, 231, 232; churches in, 
236; religious sentiment, 239. 

New Hampshire, 171 ; under royal 
govt., 200 ; Dartmouth College, 
230. 



INDEX 



259 



New Jersey, 134; under royal 
govt., 200; democracy in, 201; 
Rutgers College, 230. 

New York, 122, 126, 13S, 179; 
Germans in, 6, 28; patroons 
in, 10, 201; character of early 
houses, 10 ; convention at Albany, 
74 ; stripped by the British, 93 ; 
Dutch in, 108; mob in, 132; col- 
onial Congress in, 1 56 ; refused 
to land tea, 175; street cleaning 
in, 209; King's College (Colum- 
bia), 230. 

Niagara, 77, 81. 

Non-importation, poUcy of, 161, 
181. 

North, Lord, 165,166. 

Nova Scotia, 25, 55. 



O 



Oglethorpe, General James, 
planted the Georgia colony, 32 ; 
character of, 32, 33, 35 ; as a pro- 
prietor, 34 ; in Florida, 53, 203. 

Ohio, Company, 61 ; country, 98 ; 
securedby the Eng., 103, "Scotch- 
Irish " in, 187. 

Opinion, pubUc, 153, 154. 

Oppression, 115, 122; resistance 
to, 156, 180 ; protest against, 161 ; 
crystallized into war, 200. 

Otis, James, 113, 115, 116, 153, 
154, 170, 206, 229, 231 ; argued 
against writs of assistance, 116. 

Ownership, private, 10; of plan- 
tations, 134, 202; land, 202, 219; 
of slaves, 203. 



Paper, stamped, 132; see Stamp 
Act. 

Palatinate, people from, 28. 

Parliament, British, 1 16, 117, 167; 
representation in, 1 18-120 ; as- 
sumed to rule Englishmen in 
America, 122; right of, to gov- 
ern colonies, 123, 159, 161, 173; 

Q 



tax of, for support of troops, 127; 
troops to enforce the laws of, 1 28 ; 
Stamp Act, 128, opposition of, 
to, 131 ; challenge of colonies to, 
157; right of tax, 161, 173; and 
Geo. III., 166 ; declared colonies 
"in rebellion, " 194; see British, 
Trade Laws. 

" Parsons' Cause," 148, 149. 

Patriotism, growth of, 16S, 175, 
203 ; see Henry. 

Patroons, in N. Y., 10; system 
of, 201. 

Peace, at the close of King Wil- 
liam's War, 24; made in 17 13, 
26; between France and Eng- 
land, 57, 105 ; at the close of the 
Revolution, 194, 195. 

Pens, 228. 

Pennsylvania, 122, 126,127,134; 
Quakers in, 5 ; Germans from 
N. Y., immigrate to, 6, 28, 184; 
Dutch, 29; " Penn. Dutch," 185; 
" Scotch-Irish " in, 30 ; call upon 
farmers of, 78 ; influence of im- 
migrants, 108; interest of, 145; 
protection of, 179; under propri- 
etary government, 200 ; democ- 
racy in, 200; University of, 230. 

People, English, representation 
of, II 7-1 20; rights guaranteed to, 
134 ; supported troops in Ameri- 
ca, 133. 

Pepperell, 57. 

Philadelphia, Congress in, 180; 
streets in, 209 ; College of (now 
Univ. of Penn.), 230. 

Pickney, 206. 

Pickney, Eliza, 45-47. 

Pioneers, 1S8-193. 

Piracy, 55, 56. 

Pitt, Fort, 98. 

Pitt, William, 94, 95, 102, 104, 
113, 160. 

Pittsburg, 68,96, 98. 

Plantation Book, 3. 

Plantations, in the Carolinas, 40, 
42 ; life on, 87 ; units of govern- 
ment, 87 ; in the South, 134 ; so- 



260 



INDEX 



cial centers, 136 ; owned by Cava- 
liers, 202 ; white bondsmen on, 
218; see Life, Slavery, Soutii. 

Planters, 136; education of, 230. 

Plymouth, 198. 

"Pocket Boroughs," 118, 119. 

Point Pleasant, 192. 

Policy, British, provoked resis- 
tance, 124; united the interests 
of the colonies, 127, 130, 157; 
repeal of the Stamp Act, 131 ; see 
Trade Laws, 159. 

Political, recognition, 220. 

Population, 125, 220; in the 
South, 136; in the North, 138; 
negro and white, 219. 

Port Royal, 25, 55. 

Potato, Irish, 29, 30. 

Power, political, in Eng., 119; Br. 
threatened, 166. 

Preston, Mrs. Margaret J., 186. 

Principle, of local self-govern- 
ment, 8, 204; assertion of, 173; 
dominating, 204 ; Tory, 207, 208. 

Privateers, 55, 56. 

Products, 44, 45, 187, 219, 221, 

237- 
Property, in Georgia, 36, 37 ; 

qualification, for suffrage, 120, 

220. 
Proprietary, government, under 

Oglethorpe, 34 et seq.; in the 

Carolinas, 50, 199; general form 

of, 198; in Va., 199; in Penn., 

200. 
Prosperity, of the Carolinas, 45; 

of the colonies, chap, on, 218 et 

seq. ; 224. 
Protests, of Mass. and Va., 161. 
Providence, 169, 230. 



Quakers, 31, 108. 

Quebec, 55 ; Wolfe's expedition 

against, 104, 105 ; fall of, 105. 
" Quebec Act," 179, 
Queen Anne, 25. 



R 



Raven EL, Mrs., 46. 
Reading, 226. 

liEBELLION, 50, 162, 169, 194. 

Refrigeration, 235. 

Regulars, British, defeated, 80, 
81 ; compared with American 
troops, 95 ; quartered on the col- 
onies, 127 ; no need of, 128 ; sup- 
ported by Enghsh taxpayers, 133. 

Religion, Christianity, belief in, 
a qualification for suffrage, 120; 
teaching of asceticism, 142 ; Eng- 
lish church, in Virginia, 146; 
churches, in New England, 236, 
238 ; sentiment and public amuse- 
ments, 239. 

Repeal, Act of, 173. 

Representation, 116; and taxa- 
tion of the colonies in Parliament, 
116; of the English people, 117, 
118 ; class, 120. 

Resistance, to British aggression, 
130; determined upon, 132; in 
N. Y. and Boston, 132 ; defeated 
British government, 1 23 ; growth 
of spirit of, 145, 154; to British 
oppression, 156, 161 ; first active, 
162; colonists driven to, 169; to 
tea tax, 173-175, 177 ; to oppres- 
sion, 180; extreme measure of, 
180, 181. 

Resources, 181,182. 

Revenue, attempt to collect, 123; 
from Stamp Act, 1 28 ; officers, 
132. 

Revolt, from authority, 6 ; spirit of 
8, 58^0 ; against English trade 
laws, 19 ; idea of, beginning of 
the eighteenth century, 21, 122, 
124; beginning of chap, on, 125 
et seq.; stamp tax, 128, 129; 
new occasion for, 132; Ameri- 
cans on verge of, 166 ; Henry 
fired spirit of, 202. 

Revolution, American, 61 ; jeal- 
ousy of colonists, during, 90 ; war 
cry of, 116, 117 ; Stamp Act, 127 



INDEX 



261 



et seq. ; condition of life, prior 
to, 134 et seq. ; tocsin of, in Vir- 
ginia, 149 ; influence of Henry, 
150, 202 ; "irrepressible conflict," 
165 ; drifting toward, chapter on, 
171 et seq. ; seizure of tea, 176; 
migration westward, before, 183; 
Geo. Rogers Clark, 192 ; West, 
settled before, 195 ; preparations 
for, I S3 et seq. ; the approach 
of, chapter on, 194 et seq. ; no 
formal declaration of war, 194; 
colonies declared " in rebellion," 
194; a phase of colonial govern- 
ment, 195 ; armed conflict, reason 
for, 201; contribution of aristoc- 
racy to, 202, 203 ; " storm and 
stress " period of, 203; colonists 
at the outbreak of, 205 ; right to 
govern asserted, 206 ; tories in, 
206 ; New England commerce, 
before, 221 ; influence of scholarly 
men in, 230. 

Rhode Island, 6 ; 171 ; under 
charter government, 200 ; democ- 
racy in, 201. 

Rice, planted in Charleston, 44 ; in 
S. Car., 219, 221. 

Rights, colonists insist upon, 131 ; 
violation of, 132 ; assertion of, 
chapter on, 156 et seq., 174, 204; 
trial by jury, 157, 169; constant 
struggle for, 231. 

Roads, maintenance, 8S ; dirt, 209 ; 
opening of, 242. 

Robertson, James, 189, 190. 

"Rotten Boroughs," 118. 

Royal, colony, Georgia, 37 ; S. 
Carolina, 50; in N. Carolina, 51. 

Rutgers College, 230. 

Rutledge, John, 202, 203-206. 



Sabbatarianism, 216, 217. 
Sailors, 222, 223. 
Salem, 138, 177. 
Sanitation, lack of, 209 et seq. 
Savannah, colonized, 35, 133. 
Sawmills, 15, 138. 



Schools, colonial, 88, 90; in New 
England, 226 ; "old field schools," 
229. 

" Scotch-irish," 29 ; settled in the 
wilderness, 6 ; in Penn., 30, 108; 
character of, as immigrants, 30; 
West India islands, 112; power 
not dangerous, 1 28 ; migrated 
southward, 1S6; service of, to 
America, 1S6; in the Ohio coun- 
try 1 87. 

Self-government, 126; local, prin- 
ciple of, 8 ; differences of, 204 ; 
assertion of right of, 157; inter- 
fered with, 199 ; rights of, in char- 
ter colonies, 199, 200. 

Sentiment, public, 112; Henry, a 
leader of, 153 ; reflection of, 154. 

Separation, 158-175. 

Servants, white, 11, 36, 218, 219; 
see Negro. 

Settlers, at Jamestown, 194, 196; 
at Plymouth, 198; in Mass. Bay 
Colony, 198; see Pioneers. 

Seventeenth century, 8. 

Sevier, John, 189, 190. 

Shipping, 112, 167, 168, 221. 

Shirley, Governor, 55, 56, 77, 82. 

Shelby, Isaac, 1S9. 

Slavery, Indian, 49. 

Slavery, Negro, 109, 11 1, 203, 
218 ; law against, in Georgia, 37 ; 
British interference, in; in Va. 
and S. Car., 219. 

Smallpox, 211, 212, 234. 

Smuggling, colonial, 167, 168. 

Smith, Thomas, 44. 

Spain, at war with England, 52. 

Spanish, assailed the Americans, 
25 ; claimed Georgia territory, 32 ; 
Georgia warded off, 32 ; brought 
about an Indian war, 49 ; invaded 
Georgia, 54. 

Social, systems, 108 ; Hfe in the 
South, 136; intercourse in New 
England, and "lectures," 240. 

Sovereignty, 8, 190. 

South, life in, 87-90 ; units of gov- 

1 eminent, 8-^, 88 ; schools in, 88, 



262 



INDEX 



229; conservatism in, )o8; agri- 
culture in, 126, 134, 145, 221 ; plan- 
tations in, 134; cities in, 136; con- 
ditions of streets in, 210; migration 
of " Scotch-Irish,'" into, 86 ; owner- 
ship of slaves in, 203 ; climate of, 
214 ; white bondmen in, 218, 219 ; 
political recognition in, 220 ; 
planters in, 230, 231 ; education 
in, 231. 
Spelling, 224, 225. 
Stamp Act, 128, 131, 154; drew 
_ colonies together, 156; repeal, 

159- 
Staples, 221. 

State, first independent, 190. 
Statesmanship, English, 195, 196. 
Stoves, 213, 214, 215, 235. 
Streets, 209, 210. 
Stupidity, British, 96; caused the 

Revolution, 194. 
Subjection, i 17, 160. 
Steerage, in Puritan colonies, 120; 

in Va., 219 ; manhood, 220. 
Sugar and Molasses Act, 112. 
Surgery, 233, 234. 



Taxation, 75, 91 ; of slaves, no; 
without representation, 116; Eng- 
lish idea of, 116; for support of 
British troops, 127 ; of clergymen, 
146; internal and external, 160; 
external, 160 ; British right of, 
161, 162, 165. 

Tea, duty on, 161, 173, 174. 

Tennessee, and Kentucky region, 
188 ; settlement in, 190. 

Theaters, 141. 

Theology, 232. 

Ticonderoga, 95, 102, 103, 104. 

Timber, 139, 140. 

Tobacco, bounties of, 18 ; currency, 
146, 24 I ; " Parsons' Cause," 148, 

'49- 
Town, Government, in N. E., 8, 87 ; 

meeting, 162, 205, 236, 239. 
Townshend Acts, 160, 161, 172. 



Trade, organized by the colonists, 

3- 

Trade Laws, antagonistic to colo- 
nial manufactures, 16 ; encouraged 
the smelting of iron in the colo- 
nies, 17 ; encouraged manufacture 
of glass, linen, 17, 18; ship stores, 
19; forbade manufacture of 
woolen cloths, 19; not rigorously 
enforced, 19; attempt to enforce, 
chap, on, 1 13 et seq. ; evasions of, 
114; oppression of, 115; revolt 
against, 1 16; resistance to, 167. 

Traditions, English, 108; clung to 

Transylvania, 192, 193. 

Trent, William, 69. 

Trial, by jury, 157 ; right of, in- 
vaded, 166 ; " Intolerable Acts," 
177, 180. 

Troops, quartered upon the people, 
127 ; in Boston, 161 ; attacked by 
mob, 162; "Boston Massacre," 
162; withdrawal demanded, 162, 
163; removed from Boston, 165; 
Frankhn urged their payment, 
207. 



U 



Union, Franklin's plan of, 75; of 
the North and the South, 130; 
cemented by the "Quebec Act," 
179, 180; through oppression, 
iSo ; bond of, 205. 



V 



Vaccination, 211. 

Vehicles, 242. 

Ventilation, of sleeping rooms, 
212. 

Virginia, value of a shilling in, 3 ; 
Cavaliers in, 5 ; county court in, 
8, 205 ; early immigration, 10 ; at- 
tracted English gentlemen, 10; 
houses in, 12 ; came to assistance 
of the CaroUna colony, 48 ; com- 
pany formed in, to settle the Ohio 



INDEX 



263 



country, 6i ; Dinwiddie, governor 
of, 64 ; defended her men in the 
Ohio valley, 67 ; unable to con- 
quer Ohio country, 76 ; troops of, 
under Kraddock, 76; under Wash- 
ington, 80, 97 ; Thomas Jefferson 
in, 87, 151, 152, 206, 229, 231; 
schools in, 88, 229 ; Earl of Lou- 
doun, 93 ; House of Burgesses, 98, 
99, 100, 146, 147; on slave ques- 
tion, no; property qualification 
for suffrage, 120, 219; English 
church established in, 146; re- 
sisted British interference, 147 ; 
Patrick Henry, chapter on, 145 et 
seq., 202 ; tocsin of Revolution in, 
149 ; asserted right to govern her- 
self, 151 ; General Assembly of 
the Colony, 151 ; stamp tax in, 
154; protest of, 161; and Mass. 
leaders, 171 ; migration into, of 
" Penn. Dutch," 1S5 ; of the 
"Scotch-Irish," 1S6; Kentucky 
a part of, 191 ; defeated Indians, 
at Point Pleasant, 192 ; people of, 
settled in the West, 192 ; army 
under Clark of, 192, 193; legisla- 
ture of, 193; County of Kentucky, 
193; early colonists in, 196, 198; 
owned by corporate proprietors, 
199 ; under royal government, 199, 
200; aristocracy and democracy in, 
201 ; Cavaliers in, 202 ; aristocratic 
county courts, 205 ; negro slavery 
in, 219; suffrage in, 219; aristoc- 
racy in, 201,205, 220; population 
in, 220 ; " old field schools," 229 ; 
College of William and Mary, 
230 ; funerals in, drinking at, 241. 

W 

Walpole, Horace, 165, 166. 

Wars, colonists fought against the 
Spanish, French and Indians, 22, 
23 ; King William's War, 24 ; 
between English and French 
colonies, 25; Indian, 49; of the 
colonists, chapter on, 52 et seq. ; 



England and Spain, 52 et seq. ; 
France and England, known as 
King George's War, 54 et seq. ; 
the first independent colonial war, 
chapter on, 64 et seq.; Great 
French and Indian War, 62, 71, 
107, 183 ; against French, without 
permission of England, 73 et seq.; 
trouble in management of colo- 
nial, 92 et seq. ; expenses of, 94 ; 
destruction of French power, 
chapter on, 92 et seq. ; Second 
War for Independence, 195 ; see 
French, Indians, Revolution, 
Spanish. 
Washington, George, the repre- 
sentative of Gov. Dinwiddie, 64 ; 
return trip, 66 ; reward, 67 ; saw 
the key to the Ohio country, 68 ; 
sent to assist Trent, 69 ; moved 
against Fort Duquesne, 70 ; de- 
feated, by the French, 72 ; aid-de- 
camp, 79 ; accepted no pay or re- 
ward for services rendered, 79 ; 
saved British troops, 80 ; covered 
Braddock's retreat, 81 ; and Gen. 
Forbes, 97 ; in command of expe- 
dition against Fort Duquesne, 97 ; 
took Duquesne, 98 ; recognized as 
an able commander and organ- 
izer, 98 ; elected to the House of 
Burgesses, 98 ; at Mt. Vernon, 99 ; 
took his seat in the Virginia as- 
sembly, 100; his first and only 
breakdown, loi ; spirit of, 206, 
Waterford, 64. 
Water Supply, colonial, 216. 
Watauga, first independent state, 

190. 
Wealth, colonial, chapter on, 134 
et seq. ; against disturbance, 206 ; 
indications of, 242. 
Wells, 210. 

West, opening up of, 105 ; migra- 
tion to, chap, on, 183 et seq. ; 
people in, 187, 192 ; settlements 
in, before the Revolution, 189, 

193- 
West Indies, 112, 



264 



INDEX 



West Virginia, 6i. 

"Wheat, 221. 

William Henry, Fort, 94. 

William and Mary, College of, 

230. 
Williams, Roger, 6. 



Wolfe, Gen. James, 104, 105. Yankees, 57, 112, 123, 167, 168 



" Writs of Assistance," i 15, 1 16, 
123. 



Yale College, 230. 



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